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214-511: Reasoning involves using more-or-less rational processes of thinking and cognition to extrapolate from one's existing knowledge to generate new knowledge, and involves the use of one's intellect . The field of logic studies the ways in which humans can use formal reasoning to produce logically valid arguments and true conclusions. Reasoning may be subdivided into forms of logical reasoning , such as deductive reasoning , inductive reasoning , and abductive reasoning . Aristotle drew

428-638: A broader version of "addition and subtraction" which is not limited to numbers. This understanding of reason is sometimes termed "calculative" reason. Similar to Descartes, Hobbes asserted that "No discourse whatsoever, can end in absolute knowledge of fact, past, or to come" but that "sense and memory" is absolute knowledge. In the late 17th century through the 18th century, John Locke and David Hume developed Descartes's line of thought still further. Hume took it in an especially skeptical direction, proposing that there could be no possibility of deducing relationships of cause and effect, and therefore no knowledge

642-604: A changeless intelligible world. Instead, they only exist to the extent that they are instantiated. The mind learns to discriminate universals through abstraction from experience. This explanation avoids various of the objections raised against Platonism. Conceptualism is closely related to Aristotelianism. It states that thinking consists in mentally evoking concepts. Some of these concepts may be innate, but most have to be learned through abstraction from sense experience before they can be used in thought. It has been argued against these views that they have problems in accounting for

856-483: A changeless realm different from the sensible world. Examples include the forms of goodness, beauty, unity, and sameness. On this view, the difficulty of thinking consists in being unable to grasp the Platonic forms and to distinguish them as the original from the mere imitations found in the sensory world. This means, for example, distinguishing beauty itself from derivative images of beauty. One problem for this view

1070-411: A clear definition of the features a representational system has to embody in order to have a linguistic structure. On the level of syntax, the representational system has to possess two types of representations: atomic and compound representations. Atomic representations are basic whereas compound representations are constituted either by other compound representations or by atomic representations. On

1284-602: A departure from solely religious texts. Publications include Encyclopédie (1751–72) that was edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert . The Dictionnaire philosophique (Philosophical Dictionary, 1764) and Letters on the English (1733) written by Voltaire spread the ideals of the Enlightenment. Coinciding with the Age of Enlightenment was the scientific revolution , spearheaded by Newton. This included

1498-466: A distinct phenomenology but contends that thinking still depends on sensory experience because it cannot occur on its own. On this view, sensory contents constitute the foundation from which thinking may arise. An often-cited thought experiment in favor of the existence of a distinctive cognitive phenomenology involves two persons listening to a radio broadcast in French, one who understands French and

1712-451: A distinction between logical discursive reasoning (reason proper), and intuitive reasoning , in which the reasoning process through intuition—however valid—may tend toward the personal and the subjectively opaque. In some social and political settings logical and intuitive modes of reasoning may clash, while in other contexts intuition and formal reason are seen as complementary rather than adversarial. For example, in mathematics , intuition

1926-783: A foundation embraced and built upon by the Roman Empire as it swept up Europe and the Mediterranean world , including the Hellenistic world in its conquests in the 1st century BCE. Following the Roman conquest of the Hellenistic world, the concept of a "West" arose, as there was a cultural divide between the Greek East and Latin West . The Latin-speaking Western Roman Empire consisted of Western Europe and Northwest Africa, while

2140-470: A foundation of all possible knowledge, Descartes decided to throw into doubt all knowledge— except that of the mind itself in the process of thinking: At this time I admit nothing that is not necessarily true. I am therefore precisely nothing but a thinking thing; that is a mind, or intellect, or understanding, or reason—words of whose meanings I was previously ignorant. This eventually became known as epistemological or "subject-centred" reason, because it

2354-550: A free society each individual must be able to pursue their goals however they see fit, as long as their actions conform to principles given by reason. He formulated such a principle, called the " categorical imperative ", which would justify an action only if it could be universalized: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. In contrast to Hume, Kant insisted that reason itself (German Vernunft ) could be used to find solutions to metaphysical problems, especially

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2568-830: A genetic predisposition to language itself include Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker . If reason is symbolic thinking, and peculiarly human, then this implies that humans have a special ability to maintain a clear consciousness of the distinctness of "icons" or images and the real things they represent. Merlin Donald writes: Thought In their most common sense, the terms thought and thinking refer to cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation . Their most paradigmatic forms are judging , reasoning , concept formation, problem solving , and deliberation . But other mental processes, like considering an idea , memory , or imagination , are also often included. These processes can happen internally independent of

2782-429: A global culture that could ignore national frontiers. Literacy became almost universal, encouraging the growth of books, magazines and newspapers. The influence of cinema and radio remained, while televisions became near essentials in every home. By the mid-20th century, Western culture was exported worldwide, and the development and growth of international transport and telecommunication (such as transatlantic cable and

2996-624: A leading light for the West's democracy and rapid economic development. Joseph Schumpeter , an economist of the twentieth century, referring to the Scholastics , wrote, "it is they who come nearer than does any other group to having been the 'founders' of scientific economics." The rediscovery of the Justinian Code in Western Europe early in the 10th century rekindled a passion for the discipline of law, which crossed many of

3210-436: A low number of atomic representations. This applies to thought since human beings are capable of entertaining an infinite number of distinct thoughts even though their mental capacities are quite limited. Other characteristic features of thinking include systematicity and inferential coherence . Fodor argues that the language of thought hypothesis is true as it explains how thought can have these features and because there

3424-423: A model of communicative reason that sees it as an essentially cooperative activity, based on the fact of linguistic intersubjectivity . Nikolas Kompridis proposed a widely encompassing view of reason as "that ensemble of practices that contributes to the opening and preserving of openness" in human affairs, and a focus on reason's possibilities for social change. The philosopher Charles Taylor , influenced by

3638-490: A moral decision, "morality is, at the very least, the effort to guide one's conduct by reason —that is, doing what there are the best reasons for doing—while giving equal [and impartial] weight to the interests of all those affected by what one does." The proposal that reason gives humanity a special position in nature has been argued to be a defining characteristic of western philosophy and later western science , starting with classical Greece. Philosophy can be described as

3852-421: A more explicit explanation of what computation is. A further problem consists in explaining the sense in which thinking is a form of computing. The traditionally dominant view defines computation in terms of Turing machines , though contemporary accounts often focus on neural networks for their analogies. A Turing machine is capable of executing any algorithm based on a few very basic principles, such as reading

4066-413: A natural order that was itself understood to have aims. Perhaps starting with Pythagoras or Heraclitus , the cosmos was even said to have reason. Reason, by this account, is not just a characteristic that people happen to have. Reason was considered of higher stature than other characteristics of human nature, because it is something people share with nature itself, linking an apparently immortal part of

4280-463: A new problem. On this view, the important difference is that this process happens inwardly as a form of simulation. This process is often much more efficient since once the solution is found in thought, only the behavior corresponding to the found solution has to be outwardly carried out and not all the others. When thinking is understood in a wide sense, it includes both episodic memory and imagination . In episodic memory, events one experienced in

4494-565: A nominal, though habitual, connection to either (for example) smoke or fire. One example of such a system of symbols and signs is language . The connection of reason to symbolic thinking has been expressed in different ways by philosophers. Thomas Hobbes described the creation of "Markes, or Notes of remembrance" as speech . He used the word speech as an English version of the Greek word logos so that speech did not need to be communicated. When communicated, such speech becomes language, and

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4708-450: A part of executive decision making , is also closely identified with the ability to self-consciously change, in terms of goals , beliefs , attitudes , traditions , and institutions , and therefore with the capacity for freedom and self-determination . Psychologists and cognitive scientists have attempted to study and explain how people reason , e.g. which cognitive and neural processes are engaged, and how cultural factors affect

4922-551: A place changes and what is meant by the terminology changes. It is difficult to determine which individuals or places or trends fit into which category, and the East–West contrast is sometimes criticized as relativistic and arbitrary. Globalization has spread Western ideas so widely that almost all modern cultures are, to some extent, influenced by aspects of Western culture. Stereotypical views of "the West" have been labeled " Occidentalism ", paralleling " Orientalism "—the term for

5136-484: A reaction to particular external stimuli. On this view, having a particular thought is the same as having a disposition to behave in a certain way. This view is often motivated by empirical considerations: it is very difficult to study thinking as a private mental process but it is much easier to study how organisms react to a certain situation with a given behavior. In this sense, the capacity to solve problems not through existing habits but through creative new approaches

5350-519: A regular language, like English or French, but has its own type of language with the corresponding symbols and syntax. This theory is known as the language of thought hypothesis . Inner speech theory has a strong initial plausibility since introspection suggests that indeed many thoughts are accompanied by inner speech. But its opponents usually contend that this is not true for all types of thinking. It has been argued, for example, that forms of daydreaming constitute non-linguistic thought. This issue

5564-470: A regular wall can be understood as computing an algorithm since they are "isomorphic to the formal structure of the program" in question under the right interpretation. This would lead to the implausible conclusion that the wall is thinking. Another objection focuses on the idea that computationalism captures only some aspects of thought but is unable to account for other crucial aspects of human cognition. A great variety of types of thinking are discussed in

5778-527: A result of the Christian revival of Greek philosophy, and the long Christian medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities. This period is commonly referred to as the Renaissance . In the following century, this process was further enhanced by an exodus of Greek Christian priests and scholars to Italian cities such as Florence and Venice after

5992-530: A solution, or of heuristics : rules that are understood but that do not always guarantee solutions. Cognitive science differs from cognitive psychology in that algorithms that are intended to simulate human behavior are implemented or implementable on a computer. In other instances, solutions may be found through insight, a sudden awareness of relationships. Western culture Western culture , also known as Western civilization , European civilization , Occidental culture , or Western society , refers to

6206-399: A specific direction to obtain what he or she wants. The question, then, is how it can be possible for conscious experiences to arise out of a lump of gray matter endowed with nothing but electrochemical properties. A related problem is to explain how someone's propositional attitudes (e.g. beliefs and desires) can cause that individual's neurons to fire and his muscles to contract in exactly

6420-440: A symbol from a cell, writing a symbol to a cell, and executing instructions based on the symbols read. This way it is possible to perform deductive reasoning following the inference rules of formal logic as well as simulating many other functions of the mind, such as language processing, decision making, and motor control. But computationalism does not only claim that thinking is in some sense similar to computation. Instead, it

6634-464: A synonym for "reasoning". In contrast to the use of "reason" as an abstract noun , a reason is a consideration that either explains or justifies events, phenomena, or behavior . Reasons justify decisions, reasons support explanations of natural phenomena, and reasons can be given to explain the actions (conduct) of individuals. The words are connected in this way: using reason, or reasoning, means providing good reasons. For example, when evaluating

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6848-446: A system of logic. Psychologist David Moshman, citing Bickhard and Campbell, argues for a " metacognitive conception of rationality" in which a person's development of reason "involves increasing consciousness and control of logical and other inferences". Reason is a type of thought , and logic involves the attempt to describe a system of formal rules or norms of appropriate reasoning. The oldest surviving writing to explicitly consider

7062-592: A time, either starting at the beginning and moving forward or starting at the end and moving backward. So when planning a trip, one could plan the different stages of the trip from origin to destiny in the chronological order of how the trip will be realized, or in the reverse order. Obstacles to problem solving can arise from the thinker's failure to take certain possibilities into account by fixating on one specific course of action. There are important differences between how novices and experts solve problems. For example, experts tend to allocate more time for conceptualizing

7276-411: A way of life based upon reason, while reason has been among the major subjects of philosophical discussion since ancient times. Reason is often said to be reflexive , or "self-correcting", and the critique of reason has been a persistent theme in philosophy. For many classical philosophers , nature was understood teleologically , meaning that every type of thing had a definitive purpose that fit within

7490-417: A way that can be explained, for example as cause and effect. In the explanation of Locke , for example, reason requires the mental use of a third idea in order to make this comparison by use of syllogism . More generally, according to Charles Sanders Peirce , reason in the strict sense requires the ability to create and manipulate a system of symbols , as well as indices and icons , the symbols having only

7704-489: A way that is consistent with monotheism and the immortality and divinity of the human soul. For example, in the neoplatonist account of Plotinus , the cosmos has one soul, which is the seat of all reason, and the souls of all people are part of this soul. Reason is for Plotinus both the provider of form to material things, and the light which brings people's souls back into line with their source. The classical view of reason, like many important Neoplatonic and Stoic ideas,

7918-413: A whole. Others, including Hegel, believe that it has obscured the importance of intersubjectivity , or "spirit" in human life, and they attempt to reconstruct a model of what reason should be. Some thinkers, e.g. Foucault, believe there are other forms of reason, neglected but essential to modern life, and to our understanding of what it means to live a life according to reason. Others suggest that there

8132-659: Is a form of thinking that is reasonable, reflective, and focused on determining what to believe or how to act. Positive thinking involves focusing one's attention on the positive aspects of one's situation and is intimately related to optimism . The terms "thought" and "thinking" refer to a wide variety of psychological activities. In their most common sense, they are understood as conscious processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation. This includes various different mental processes, like considering an idea or proposition or judging it to be true. In this sense, memory and imagination are forms of thought but perception

8346-414: Is associated with a sober, dispassionate, and rational approach to its topic while feeling involves a direct emotional engagement. The terms "thought" and "thinking" can also be used to refer not to the mental processes themselves but to mental states or systems of ideas brought about by these processes. In this sense, they are often synonymous with the term "belief" and its cognates and may refer to

8560-432: Is based on reasoning alone, even if it seems otherwise. Hume famously remarked that, "We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." Hume also took his definition of reason to unorthodox extremes by arguing, unlike his predecessors, that human reason

8774-488: Is based on the knowing subject , who perceives the rest of the world and itself as a set of objects to be studied, and successfully mastered, by applying the knowledge accumulated through such study. Breaking with tradition and with many thinkers after him, Descartes explicitly did not divide the incorporeal soul into parts, such as reason and intellect, describing them instead as one indivisible incorporeal entity. A contemporary of Descartes, Thomas Hobbes described reason as

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8988-420: Is claimed that thinking just is a form of computation or that the mind is a Turing machine. Computationalist theories of thought are sometimes divided into functionalist and representationalist approaches. Functionalist approaches define mental states through their causal roles but allow both external and internal events in their causal network. Thought may be seen as a form of program that can be executed in

9202-523: Is clearly defined. It guarantees success if applied correctly. The long multiplication usually taught in school is an example of an algorithm for solving the problem of multiplying big numbers. Heuristics, on the other hand, are informal procedures. They are rough rules-of-thumb that tend to bring the thinker closer to the solution but success is not guaranteed in every case even if followed correctly. Examples of heuristics are working forward and working backward. These approaches involve planning one step at

9416-419: Is entertained, evidence for and against it is considered, and, based on this reasoning, the proposition is either affirmed or rejected. It is sometimes argued that the experience of truth is central to thinking, i.e. that thinking aims at representing how the world is. It shares this feature with perception but differs from it in the way how it represents the world: without the use of sensory contents. One of

9630-518: Is especially valued. Photography and the motion picture as both a technology and basis for entirely new art forms were also developed in the West. The ballet is a distinctively Western form of performance dance. The ballroom dance is an important Western variety of dance for the elite. The polka , the square dance , the flamenco , and the Irish step dance are very well known Western forms of folk dance . Greek and Roman theatre are considered

9844-441: Is imagism. It states that thinking involves entertaining a sequence of images where earlier images conjure up later images based on the laws of association. One problem with this view is that we can think about things that we cannot imagine. This is especially relevant when the thought involves very complex objects or infinities, which is common, for example, in mathematical thought. One criticism directed at associationism in general

10058-447: Is implemented by the brain or which other similarities to natural language it has. The language of thought hypothesis was first introduced by Jerry Fodor . He argues in favor of this claim by holding that it constitutes the best explanation of the characteristic features of thinking. One of these features is productivity : a system of representations is productive if it can generate an infinite number of unique representations based on

10272-431: Is in an important sense similar to hearing sounds, it involves the use of language and it constitutes a motor plan that could be used for actual speech. This connection to language is supported by the fact that thinking is often accompanied by muscle activity in the speech organs. This activity may facilitate thinking in certain cases but is not necessary for it in general. According to some accounts, thinking happens not in

10486-537: Is known as cognitivism , which is interested in how people mentally represent information processing. It had its foundations in the Gestalt psychology of Max Wertheimer , Wolfgang Köhler , and Kurt Koffka , and in the work of Jean Piaget , who provided a theory of stages/phases that describes children's cognitive development. Cognitive psychologists use psychophysical and experimental approaches to understand, diagnose, and solve problems, concerning themselves with

10700-456: Is light cannot be dark. Therefore, feathers cannot be dark". An important aspect of fallacies is that they seem to be rationally compelling on the first look and thereby seduce people into accepting and committing them. Whether an act of reasoning constitutes a fallacy does not depend on whether the premises are true or false but on their relation to the conclusion and, in some cases, on the context. Concepts are general notions that constitute

10914-426: Is more basic or fundamental since predicative experience is in some sense built on top of it and therefore depends on it. Another way how phenomenologists have tried to distinguish the experience of thinking from other types of experiences is in relation to empty intentions in contrast to intuitive intentions . In this context, "intention" means that some kind of object is experienced. In intuitive intentions ,

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11128-427: Is mortal". Other theories of judgment focus more on the relation between the judged proposition and reality. According to Franz Brentano , a judgment is either a belief or a disbelief in the existence of some entity. In this sense, there are only two fundamental forms of judgment: "A exists" and "A does not exist". When applied to the sentence "all men are mortal", the entity in question is "immortal men", of whom it

11342-414: Is no good alternative explanation. Some arguments against the language of thought hypothesis are based on neural networks, which are able to produce intelligent behavior without depending on representational systems. Other objections focus on the idea that some mental representations happen non-linguistically, for example, in the form of maps or images. Computationalists have been especially interested in

11556-422: Is not clear what steps need to be taken, i.e. there is no clear formula that would lead to success if followed correctly. In this case, the solution may sometimes come in a flash of insight in which the problem is suddenly seen in a new light. Another way to categorize different forms of problem solving is by distinguishing between algorithms and heuristics . An algorithm is a formal procedure in which each step

11770-467: Is not just one reason or rationality, but multiple possible systems of reason or rationality which may conflict (in which case there is no super-rational system one can appeal to in order to resolve the conflict). In the last several decades, a number of proposals have been made to "re-orient" this critique of reason, or to recognize the "other voices" or "new departments" of reason: For example, in opposition to subject-centred reason, Habermas has proposed

11984-510: Is not only found in humans. Aristotle asserted that phantasia (imagination: that which can hold images or phantasmata ) and phronein (a type of thinking that can judge and understand in some sense) also exist in some animals. According to him, both are related to the primary perceptive ability of animals, which gathers the perceptions of different senses and defines the order of the things that are perceived without distinguishing universals, and without deliberation or logos . But this

12198-449: Is not qualitatively different from either simply conceiving individual ideas, or from judgments associating two ideas, and that "reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls, which carries us along a certain train of ideas, and endows them with particular qualities, according to their particular situations and relations." It followed from this that animals have reason, only much less complex than human reason. In

12412-419: Is not yet reason, because human imagination is different. Terrence Deacon and Merlin Donald , writing about the origin of language , connect reason not only to language , but also mimesis . They describe the ability to create language as part of an internal modeling of reality , and specific to humankind. Other results are consciousness , and imagination or fantasy . In contrast, modern proponents of

12626-454: Is not. In a more restricted sense, only the most paradigmatic cases are considered thought. These involve conscious processes that are conceptual or linguistic and sufficiently abstract, like judging, inferring, problem solving, and deliberating. Sometimes the terms "thought" and "thinking" are understood in a very wide sense as referring to any form of mental process, conscious or unconscious. In this sense, they may be used synonymously with

12840-407: Is often combined with the language of thought hypothesis by interpreting these sequences as symbols whose order is governed by syntactic rules. Various arguments have been raised against computationalism. In one sense, it seems trivial since almost any physical system can be described as executing computations and therefore as thinking. For example, it has been argued that the molecular movements in

13054-527: Is often necessary for the creative processes involved with arriving at a formal proof , arguably the most difficult of formal reasoning tasks. Reasoning, like habit or intuition , is one of the ways by which thinking moves from one idea to a related idea. For example, reasoning is the means by which rational individuals understand the significance of sensory information from their environments, or conceptualize abstract dichotomies such as cause and effect , truth and falsehood , or good and evil . Reasoning, as

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13268-451: Is one form of non-deductive reasoning, for example, when one concludes that "the sun will rise tomorrow" based on one's experiences of all the previous days. Other forms of non-deductive reasoning include the inference to the best explanation and analogical reasoning . Fallacies are faulty forms of thinking that go against the norms of correct reasoning. Formal fallacies concern faulty inferences found in deductive reasoning. Denying

13482-422: Is outperformed by unconscious thought when complex problems with many variables are involved. This is sometimes explained through the claim that the number of items one can consciously think about at the same time is rather limited whereas unconscious thought lacks such limitations. But other researchers have rejected the claim that unconscious thought is often superior to conscious thought. Other suggestions for

13696-431: Is particularly relevant. The term "behaviorism" is also sometimes used in a slightly different sense when applied to thinking to refer to a specific form of inner speech theory. This view focuses on the idea that the relevant inner speech is a derivative form of regular outward speech. This sense overlaps with how behaviorism is understood more commonly in philosophy of mind since these inner speech acts are not observed by

13910-421: Is relevant to the question of whether animals have the capacity to think. If thinking is necessarily tied to language then this would suggest that there is an important gap between humans and animals since only humans have a sufficiently complex language. But the existence of non-linguistic thoughts suggests that this gap may not be that big and that some animals do indeed think. There are various theories about

14124-401: Is said that they do not exist. Important for Brentano is the distinction between the mere representation of the content of the judgment and the affirmation or the denial of the content. The mere representation of a proposition is often referred to as "entertaining a proposition". This is the case, for example, when one considers a proposition but has not yet made up one's mind about whether it

14338-404: Is said. Other arguments for the experience of thinking focus on the direct introspective access to thinking or on the thinker's knowledge of their own thoughts. Phenomenologists are also concerned with the characteristic features of the experience of thinking. Making a judgment is one of the prototypical forms of cognitive phenomenology. It involves epistemic agency, in which a proposition

14552-546: Is seen as the most pure or the defining form of reason: "Logic is about reasoning—about going from premises to a conclusion. ... When you do logic, you try to clarify reasoning and separate good from bad reasoning." In modern economics , rational choice is assumed to equate to logically consistent choice. However, reason and logic can be thought of as distinct—although logic is one important aspect of reason. Author Douglas Hofstadter , in Gödel, Escher, Bach , characterizes

14766-411: Is that its claim is too far-reaching. There is wide agreement that associative processes as studied by associationists play some role in how thought unfolds. But the claim that this mechanism is sufficient to understand all thought or all mental processes is usually not accepted. According to behaviorism , thinking consists in behavioral dispositions to engage in certain publicly observable behavior as

14980-409: Is the way humans posit universal laws of nature . Under practical reason, the moral autonomy or freedom of people depends on their ability, by the proper exercise of that reason, to behave according to laws that are given to them. This contrasted with earlier forms of morality, which depended on religious understanding and interpretation, or on nature , for their substance. According to Kant, in

15194-451: Is thought that happens in the background without being experienced. It is therefore not observed directly. Instead, its existence is usually inferred by other means. For example, when someone is faced with an important decision or a difficult problem, they may not be able to solve it straight away. But then, at a later time, the solution may suddenly flash before them even though no conscious steps of thinking were taken towards this solution in

15408-440: Is to explain how humans can learn and think about Platonic forms belonging to a different realm. Plato himself tries to solve this problem through his theory of recollection, according to which the soul already was in contact with the Platonic forms before and is therefore able to remember what they are like. But this explanation depends on various assumptions usually not accepted in contemporary thought. Aristotelians hold that

15622-429: Is true or false. The term "thinking" can refer both to judging and to mere entertaining. This difference is often explicit in the way the thought is expressed: "thinking that" usually involves a judgment whereas "thinking about" refers to the neutral representation of a proposition without an accompanying belief. In this case, the proposition is merely entertained but not yet judged . Some forms of thinking may involve

15836-474: The Byzantine Empire) , or those countries heavily influenced by its legacy, should be counted as "Western" is an example of the possible ambiguity of the term. These questions can be traced back to the affiliation between the culture of ancient Rome and that of Classical Greece , a persistent Greek East and Latin West language-split within the Roman Empire , and an eventual permanent splitting of

16050-754: The Catholic Church , remained a dominant force in Western culture for many centuries to follow. Western culture continued to develop during the Middle Ages as reforms triggered by the medieval renaissances , the influence of the Islamic world via Al-Andalus and Sicily (including the transfer of technology from the East, and Latin translations of Arabic texts on science and philosophy by Greek and Hellenic-influenced Islamic philosophers), and

16264-585: The Greek East and Latin West divide, separated Europe into religious and cultural regions present to this day. Until the Age of Enlightenment, Christian culture took over as the predominant force in Western civilization, guiding the course of philosophy, art, and science for many years. Movements in art and philosophy, such as the Humanist movement of the Renaissance and the Scholastic movement of

16478-697: The High Middle Ages , were motivated by a drive to connect Catholicism with Greek and Arab thought imported by Christian pilgrims. However, due to the division in Western Christianity caused by the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, religious influence—especially the temporal power of the Pope—began to wane. From the late 15th century to the 17th century, Western culture began to spread to other parts of

16692-585: The Italian Renaissance as Greek scholars fleeing the fall of Constantinople brought ancient Greek and Roman texts back to central and western Europe. Medieval Christianity is credited with creating the modern university, the modern hospital system, scientific economics, and natural law (which would later influence the creation of international law ). European culture developed a complex range of philosophy, medieval scholasticism , mysticism and Christian and secular humanism , setting

16906-804: The Ottoman Empire . The process was accompanied and reinforced by the Age of Discovery and continued into the modern period. Scholars have proposed a wide variety of theories to explain why the Great Divergence happened, including lack of government intervention, geography, colonialism, and customary traditions. The Age of Discovery faded into the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, during which cultural and intellectual forces in European society emphasized reason, analysis, and individualism rather than traditional lines of authority. It challenged

17120-691: The Phoenician city-states , and several Near-Eastern cultures stimulated and fostered Western civilization. The Hellenistic period also promoted syncretism , blending Greek, Roman, and Jewish cultures. Major advances in literature, engineering, and science shaped the Hellenistic Jewish culture from which the earliest Christians and the Greek New Testament emerged. The eventual Christianization of Europe in late-antiquity would ensure that Christianity , particularly

17334-487: The Renaissance of the 12th century and 13th century. Medieval Christianity is credited with creating the first modern universities. The Catholic Church established a hospital system in Medieval Europe that vastly improved upon the Roman valetudinaria and Greek healing temples. These hospitals were established to cater to "particular social groups marginalized by poverty, sickness, and age," according to

17548-489: The Second Industrial Revolution in the transition years between 1840 and 1870, when technological and economic progress continued with the increasing adoption of steam transport (steam-powered railways, boats, and ships), the large-scale manufacture of machine tools and the increasing use of machinery in steam-powered factories. Tendencies that have come to define modern Western societies include

17762-472: The decline of religious authority marked significant cultural shifts. Tendencies that have come to define modern Western societies include the concept of political pluralism , individualism , prominent subcultures or countercultures , and increasing cultural syncretism resulting from globalization and immigration . The West as a geographical area is unclear and undefined. There is some disagreement about which nations should or should not be included in

17976-530: The decline of the Ottoman Empire occurred simultaneously in the Near East. The term "Middle East" in the mid-19th century included the territory east of the Ottoman Empire but west of China— Greater Persia and Greater India —but is now used synonymously with "Near East" in most languages. The earliest civilizations which influenced the development of Western culture were those of Mesopotamia ;

18190-506: The radiotelephone ) played a decisive role in modern globalization. The West has contributed a great many technological, political, philosophical, artistic and religious aspects to modern international culture: having been a crucible of Catholicism , Protestantism , democracy, industrialisation; the first major civilisation to seek to abolish slavery during the 19th century, the first to enfranchise women (beginning in Australasia at

18404-447: The sensory organs , unlike perception. But when understood in the widest sense, any mental event may be understood as a form of thinking, including perception and unconscious mental processes. In a slightly different sense, the term thought refers not to the mental processes themselves but to mental states or systems of ideas brought about by these processes. Various theories of thinking have been proposed, some of which aim to capture

18618-486: The 18th century, Immanuel Kant attempted to show that Hume was wrong by demonstrating that a " transcendental " self, or "I", was a necessary condition of all experience. Therefore, suggested Kant, on the basis of such a self, it is in fact possible to reason both about the conditions and limits of human knowledge. And so long as these limits are respected, reason can be the vehicle of morality, justice, aesthetics, theories of knowledge ( epistemology ), and understanding. In

18832-467: The 19th-century stereotyped views of "the East". Some philosophers have questioned whether Western culture can be considered a historically sound, unified body of thought. For example, Kwame Anthony Appiah pointed out in 2016 that many of the fundamental influences on Western culture - such as those of Greek philosophy - are also shared by the Islamic world to a certain extent. Appiah argues that

19046-557: The 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger , proposed that reason ought to include the faculty of disclosure , which is tied to the way we make sense of things in everyday life, as a new "department" of reason. In the essay "What is Enlightenment?", Michel Foucault proposed a critique based on Kant's distinction between "private" and "public" uses of reason: The terms logic or logical are sometimes used as if they were identical with reason or rational , or sometimes logic

19260-692: The Americas and the development of modern democratic institutions. Enlightenment thinkers advanced ideals of political pluralism and empirical inquiry , which, together with the Industrial Revolution , transformed Western society. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the influence of Enlightenment rationalism continued with the rise of secularism and liberal democracy , while the Industrial Revolution fueled economic and technological growth. The expansion of rights movements and

19474-717: The Catholic west and were rediscovered by Italians from scholars fleeing the 1453 fall of the Eastern Roman Empire . The subsequent Renaissance , a conscious effort by Europeans to revive and surpass the ideas and achievements of the Greco-Roman world, eventually encouraged the Age of Discovery , the Scientific Revolution , Age of Enlightenment , and the subsequent Industrial Revolution . Similarly, complicated relationships between virtually all

19688-537: The European Union where some member states have experienced falling church attendance and membership in recent years, and also elsewhere. Secularism (separating religion from politics and science) increased. Christianity remains the dominant religion in the Western world, where 70% are Christians. The West went through a series of great cultural and social changes between 1945 and 1980. The emergent mass media (film, radio, television and recorded music) created

19902-701: The Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire consisted of the Balkans , Asia Minor , Egypt and Levant . The "Greek" East was generally wealthier and more advanced than the "Latin" West. With the exception of Italia , the wealthiest provinces of the Roman Empire were in the East, particularly Roman Egypt which was the wealthiest Roman province outside of Italia. Nevertheless, the Celts in the West created some significant literature in

20116-713: The Mediterranean such as Ancient Carthage , Ancient Greece , Etruria , and Ancient Rome . The Greeks contrasted themselves with both their Eastern neighbours (such as the Trojans in Iliad ) as well as their Northern neighbours (who they considered barbarians ). Concepts of what is the West arose out of legacies of the Western and the Eastern Roman Empire. Later, ideas of the West were formed by

20330-642: The Neoplatonic view of human reason and its implications for our relationship to creation, to ourselves, and to God. The Neoplatonic conception of the rational aspect of the human soul was widely adopted by medieval Islamic philosophers and continues to hold significance in Iranian philosophy . As European intellectual life reemerged from the Dark Ages , the Christian Patristic tradition and

20544-567: The Reformation and Enlightenment, the ideas of civil rights , equality before the law, procedural justice , and democracy as the ideal form of society began to be institutionalized as principles forming the basis of modern Western culture, particularly in Protestant regions. In the 14th century, starting from Italy and then spreading throughout Europe, there was a massive artistic, architectural, scientific and philosophical revival, as

20758-512: The Roman Empire and eclipsing its antecedents and influences. The Greek and Roman paganism was gradually replaced by Christianity, first with its legalisation with the Edict of Milan and then the Edict of Thessalonica which made it the State church of the Roman Empire . Catholic Christianity, served as a unifying force in Christian parts of Europe, and in some respects replaced or competed with

20972-705: The Roman Empire in 395 into Western and Eastern halves. And perhaps, at its worst, culminating in Pope Leo III's transfer of the Roman Empire from the Eastern Roman Empire to the Frankish King Charlemagne in the form of the Holy Roman Empire in 800, the Great Schism of 1054, and the devastating Fourth Crusade of 1204. Conversely, traditions of scholarship around Plato , Aristotle , and Euclid had been forgotten in

21186-563: The United States first on radio in the 1930s, then a couple of decades later on television. The music video was also developed in the West in the middle of the 20th century. Musical theatre was developed in the West in the 19th and 20th Centuries, from music hall , comic opera , and Vaudeville ; with significant contributions from the Jewish diaspora , African-Americans , and other marginalized peoples. Western literature encompasses

21400-443: The West have come to see widespread use all over the world; among them are the guitar, violin, piano, pipe organ , saxophone, trombone, clarinet, accordion , and the theremin . In turn, it has been claimed that some European instruments have roots in earlier Eastern instruments that were adopted from the medieval Islamic world . The solo piano, symphony orchestra , and the string quartet are also significant musical innovations of

21614-474: The West in certain characteristic ways. In Western dance, music, plays and other arts, the performers are only very infrequently masked. There are essentially no taboos against depicting a god, or other religious figures, in a representational fashion. In music, Catholic monks developed the first forms of modern Western musical notation to standardize liturgy throughout the worldwide Church, and an enormous body of religious music has been composed for it through

21828-535: The West. Jan van Eyck , among other renaissance painters, made great advances in oil painting , and perspective drawings and paintings had their earliest practitioners in Florence . In art, the Celtic knot is a very distinctive Western repeated motif. Depictions of the nude human male and female in photography, painting, and sculpture are frequently considered to have special artistic merit. Realistic portraiture

22042-514: The ability to draw inferences from this concept to related concepts. Concept formation corresponds to acquiring these abilities. It has been suggested that animals are also able to learn concepts to some extent, due to their ability to discriminate between different types of situations and to adjust their behavior accordingly. In the case of problem solving , thinking aims at reaching a predefined goal by overcoming certain obstacles. This process often involves two different forms of thinking. On

22256-491: The academic literature. A common approach divides them into those forms that aim at the creation of theoretical knowledge and those that aim at producing actions or correct decisions, but there is no universally accepted taxonomy summarizing all these types. Thinking is often identified with the act of judging . A judgment is a mental operation in which a proposition is evoked and then either affirmed or denied. It involves deciding what to believe and aims at determining whether

22470-560: The ages. This led directly to the emergence and development of European classical music and its many derivatives. The Baroque style, which encompassed music, art, and architecture, was particularly encouraged by the post-Reformation Catholic Church as such forms offered a means of religious expression that was stirring and emotional, intended to stimulate religious fervor. The symphony , concerto, sonata , opera, and oratorio have their origins in Italy. Many musical instruments developed in

22684-442: The ancient world whenever they were given the opportunity (an example being the poet Caecilius Statius ), and they developed a large amount of scientific knowledge themselves (as seen in their Coligny Calendar ). For about five hundred years, the Roman Empire maintained the Greek East and consolidated a Latin West, but an east–west division remained, reflected in many cultural norms of the two areas, including language. Eventually,

22898-443: The antecedent is one type of formal fallacy, for example, "If Othello is a bachelor, then he is male. Othello is not a bachelor. Therefore, Othello is not male". Informal fallacies , on the other hand, apply to all types of reasoning. The source of their flaw is to be found in the content or the context of the argument. This is often caused by ambiguous or vague expressions in natural language , as in "Feathers are light. What

23112-423: The antecedents of modern theatre, and forms such as medieval theatre , Passion Plays , morality plays , and commedia dell'arte are considered highly influential. Elizabethan theatre , with playwrights including William Shakespeare , Christopher Marlowe , and Ben Jonson , is considered one of the most formative and important eras for modern drama. The soap opera, a popular culture dramatic form, originated in

23326-615: The area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system , largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq , northeastern Syria , southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran : the cradle of civilization . Ancient Egypt similarly had a strong influence on Western culture. Phoenician mercantilism and the introduction of the Alphabetic script boosted state formation in the Aegean and current-day Italy and current-day Spain, spawning civilizations in

23540-820: The authority of institutions that were deeply rooted in society, such as the Catholic Church; there was much talk of ways to reform society with toleration, science and skepticism . Philosophers of the Enlightenment included Francis Bacon , René Descartes , John Locke , Baruch Spinoza , Voltaire (1694–1778), Jean-Jacques Rousseau , David Hume , and Immanuel Kant , who influenced society by publishing widely read works. Upon learning about enlightened views, some rulers met with intellectuals and tried to apply their reforms, such as allowing for toleration, or accepting multiple religions, in what became known as enlightened absolutism . New ideas and beliefs spread around Europe and were fostered by an increase in literacy due to

23754-402: The body. Human perceptual experiences depend on stimuli which arrive at one's various sensory organs from the external world and these stimuli cause changes in one's mental state, ultimately causing one to feel a sensation, which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Someone's desire for a slice of pizza, for example, will tend to cause that person to move his or her body in a specific manner and in

23968-526: The category, when, and why. Certainly related conceptual terminology has changed over time in scope, meaning, and use. The term "western" draws on an affiliation with, or a perception of, a shared philosophy , worldview , political, and religious heritage grounded in the Greco-Roman world , the legacy of the Roman Empire , and medieval concepts of Christendom . For example, whether the Eastern Roman Empire (anachronistically/controversially referred to as

24182-447: The characteristic features of thinking. The theories listed here are not exclusive: it may be possible to combine some without leading to a contradiction. According to Platonism , thinking is a spiritual activity in which Platonic forms and their interrelations are discerned and inspected. This activity is understood as a form of silent inner speech in which the soul talks to itself. Platonic forms are seen as universals that exist in

24396-407: The characteristic features of thought. Platonists hold that thinking consists in discerning and inspecting Platonic forms and their interrelations. It involves the ability to discriminate between the pure Platonic forms themselves and the mere imitations found in the sensory world. According to Aristotelianism , to think about something is to instantiate in one's mind the universal essence of

24610-429: The characteristic features often ascribed to thinking and judging is that they are predicative experiences, in contrast to the pre-predicative experience found in immediate perception. On such a view, various aspects of perceptual experience resemble judgments without being judgments in the strict sense. For example, the perceptual experience of the front of a house brings with it various expectations about aspects of

24824-439: The classical era cultures of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome that expanded across the Mediterranean basin and Europe , and later circulated around the world predominantly through colonization and globalization . Historically, scholars have closely associated the idea of Western culture with the classical era of Greco-Roman antiquity . However, scholars also acknowledge that other ancient cultures, like Ancient Egypt ,

25038-579: The concept of political pluralism , individualism , prominent subcultures or countercultures (such as New Age movements) and increasing cultural syncretism resulting from globalization and immigration. Western culture has been heavily influenced by the Renaissance, the Ages of Discovery and Enlightenment and the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions . In the 20th century, Christianity declined in influence in many Western countries, mostly in

25252-653: The concepts of Latin Christendom and the Holy Roman Empire . What is thought of as Western thought today originates primarily from Greco-Roman and Christian traditions, with varying degrees of influence from the Germanic , Celtic and Slavic peoples, and includes the ideals of the Middle Ages , the Renaissance , Reformation and the Enlightenment . While the concept of a "West" did not exist until

25466-415: The correct manner. These comprise some of the puzzles that have confronted epistemologists and philosophers of mind from at least the time of René Descartes . The above reflects a classical, functional description of how we work as cognitive, thinking systems. However the apparently irresolvable mind–body problem is said to be overcome, and bypassed, by the embodied cognition approach, with its roots in

25680-419: The countries and regions within a broadly defined "West" can be discussed in the light of a persistently fragmented political landscape resulting in a lack of uniformity and significant diversity between the various cultures affiliating with this shared socio-cultural heritage. Thus, those cultures identifying with the West and with what it means to be "western" change over time as the geopolitical circumstances of

25894-413: The difference between the two forms of thinking include that conscious thought tends to follow formal logical laws while unconscious thought relies more on associative processing and that only conscious thinking is conceptually articulated and happens through the medium of language. Phenomenology is the science of the structure and contents of experience . The term "cognitive phenomenology" refers to

26108-447: The discovery of the foundations of morality. Kant claimed that these solutions could be found with his " transcendental logic ", which unlike normal logic is not just an instrument that can be used indifferently, as it was for Aristotle, but a theoretical science in its own right and the basis of all the others. According to Jürgen Habermas , the "substantive unity" of reason has dissolved in modern times, such that it can no longer answer

26322-622: The distinction in this way: Logic is done inside a system while reason is done outside the system by such methods as skipping steps, working backward, drawing diagrams, looking at examples, or seeing what happens if you change the rules of the system. Psychologists Mark H. Bickard and Robert L. Campbell argue that "rationality cannot be simply assimilated to logicality"; they note that "human knowledge of logic and logical systems has developed" over time through reasoning, and logical systems "can't construct new logical systems more powerful than themselves", so reasoning and rationality must involve more than

26536-517: The diverse culture of the Western World . The term "Western" encompasses the social norms , ethical values , traditional customs , belief systems , political systems , artifacts and technologies primarily rooted in European and Mediterranean histories. A broad concept, "Western culture" does not relate to a region with fixed members or geographical confines. It generally refers to

26750-542: The emergence of modern science , during which developments in mathematics , physics , astronomy , biology (including human anatomy ) and chemistry transformed views of society and nature. While its dates are disputed, the publication in 1543 of Nicolaus Copernicus 's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ( On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres ) is often cited as marking the beginning of

26964-661: The emergence of a Hellenistic civilization , representing a synthesis of Greek and Near-Eastern cultures in the Eastern Mediterranean region. The Near-Eastern civilizations of Ancient Egypt and the Levant , which came under Greek rule, became part of the Hellenistic world. The most important Hellenistic centre of learning was Ptolemaic Egypt , which attracted Greek, Egyptian , Jewish, Persian , Phoenician and even Indian scholars. Hellenistic science, philosophy, architecture , literature and art later provided

27178-671: The emergence of the Roman Republic , the roots of the concept can be traced back to Ancient Greece . Since Homeric literature (the Trojan Wars ), through the accounts of the Persian Wars of Greeks against Persians by Herodotus , and right up until the time of Alexander the Great , there was a paradigm of a contrast between Greeks and other civilizations. Greeks felt they were the most civilized and saw themselves (in

27392-489: The empire became increasingly split into a Western and Eastern part, reviving old ideas of a contrast between an advanced East, and a rugged West. From the time of Alexander the Great (the Hellenistic period ), Greek civilization came in contact with Jewish civilization. Christianity would eventually emerge from the syncretism of Hellenic culture , Roman culture , and Second Temple Judaism , gradually spreading across

27606-404: The empiricist tradition has been associationism , the view that thinking consists in the succession of ideas or images. This succession is seen as being governed by laws of association, which determine how the train of thought unfolds. These laws are different from logical relations between the contents of thoughts, which are found in the case of drawing inferences by moving from the thought of

27820-590: The end of the 19th century) and the first to put to use such technologies as steam , electric and nuclear power . The West invented cinema, television, the personal computer, the Internet and video games; developed sports such as soccer, cricket , golf , tennis , rugby , basketball , and volleyball ; and transported humans to an astronomical object for the first time with the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon Landing . While dance, music, visual art, story-telling, and architecture are human universals, they are expressed in

28034-568: The end of the Byzantine Empire with the fall of Constantinople. From Late Antiquity , through the Middle Ages, and onwards, while Eastern Europe was shaped by the Eastern Orthodox Church , Southern and Central Europe were increasingly stabilized by the Catholic Church which, as Roman imperial governance faded from view, was the only consistent force in Western Europe. In 1054 came the Great Schism that, following

28248-406: The example of Islamic scholars such as Alhazen , emphasised reason an intrinsic human ability to decode the created order and the structures that underlie our experienced physical reality. This interpretation of reason was instrumental to the development of the scientific method in the early Universities of the high Middle Ages. The early modern era was marked by a number of significant changes in

28462-454: The experiential character of thinking and to what extent this character can be explained in terms of sensory experience. Metaphysics is, among other things, interested in the relation between mind and matter . This concerns the question of how thinking can fit into the material world as described by the natural sciences . Cognitive psychology aims to understand thought as a form of information processing. Developmental psychology , on

28676-508: The experiential character of thinking or what it feels like to think. Some theorists claim that there is no distinctive cognitive phenomenology. On such a view, the experience of thinking is just one form of sensory experience. According to one version, thinking just involves hearing a voice internally. According to another, there is no experience of thinking apart from the indirect effects thinking has on sensory experience. A weaker version of such an approach allows that thinking may have

28890-541: The formulation of Aristotle ) as something between the advanced civilizations of the Near East (who they viewed as soft and slavish) and the wild barbarians of most of Europe to the north. During this period writers like Herodotus and Xenophon would highlight the importance of freedom in the Ancient Greek world, as opposed to the perceived slavery of the so-called barbaric world. Alexander's conquests led to

29104-477: The formulation of Kant, who wrote some of the most influential modern treatises on the subject, the great achievement of reason ( German : Vernunft ) is that it is able to exercise a kind of universal law-making. Kant was able therefore to reformulate the basis of moral-practical, theoretical, and aesthetic reasoning on "universal" laws. Here, practical reasoning is the self-legislating or self-governing formulation of universal norms , and theoretical reasoning

29318-399: The fundamental building blocks of thought. They are rules that govern how objects are sorted into different classes. A person can only think about a proposition if they possess the concepts involved in this proposition. For example, the proposition " wombats are animals" involves the concepts "wombat" and "animal". Someone who does not possess the concept "wombat" may still be able to read

29532-534: The heart of his Natural Law . In this doctrine, Thomas concludes that because humans have reason and because reason is a spark of the divine, every single human life is invaluable, all humans are equal, and every human is born with an intrinsic and permanent set of basic rights. On this foundation, the idea of human rights would later be constructed by Spanish theologians at the School of Salamanca . Other Scholastics, such as Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus , following

29746-416: The highest human happiness or well being ( eudaimonia ) as a life which is lived consistently, excellently, and completely in accordance with reason. The conclusions to be drawn from the discussions of Aristotle and Plato on this matter are amongst the most debated in the history of philosophy. But teleological accounts such as Aristotle's were highly influential for those who attempt to explain reason in

29960-522: The historian of hospitals, Guenter Risse. Christianity played a role in ending practices common among pagan societies, such as human sacrifice, slavery, infanticide and polygamy. Francisco de Vitoria , a disciple of Thomas Aquinas and a Catholic thinker who studied the issue regarding the human rights of colonized natives, is recognized by the United Nations as a father of international law, and now also by historians of economics and democracy as

30174-407: The house not directly seen, like the size and shape of its other sides. This process is sometimes referred to as apperception . These expectations resemble judgments and can be wrong. This would be the case when it turns out upon walking around the "house" that it is no house at all but only a front facade of a house with nothing behind it. In this case, the perceptual expectations are frustrated and

30388-403: The human mind with the divine order of the cosmos. Within the human mind or soul ( psyche ), reason was described by Plato as being the natural monarch which should rule over the other parts, such as spiritedness ( thumos ) and the passions. Aristotle , Plato's student, defined human beings as rational animals , emphasizing reason as a characteristic of human nature . He described

30602-500: The increasing use of steam power , and the development of machine tools . These transitions began in Great Britain and spread to Western Europe and North America within a few decades. The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in history; almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way. In particular, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth. Some economists say that

30816-747: The inferences that people draw. The field of automated reasoning studies how reasoning may or may not be modeled computationally. Animal psychology considers the question of whether animals other than humans can reason. In the English language and other modern European languages , "reason", and related words, represent words which have always been used to translate Latin and classical Greek terms in their philosophical sense. The earliest major philosophers to publish in English, such as Francis Bacon , Thomas Hobbes , and John Locke also routinely wrote in Latin and French, and compared their terms to Greek, treating

31030-462: The influence of esteemed Islamic scholars like Averroes and Avicenna contributed to the development of the Scholastic view of reason, which laid the foundation for our modern understanding of this concept. Among the Scholastics who relied on the classical concept of reason for the development of their doctrines, none were more influential than Saint Thomas Aquinas , who put this concept at

31244-501: The integration and reshaping of Roman ideas through Christian thought. The Eastern Orthodox Church founded many cathedrals , monasteries and seminaries , some of which continue to exist today. After the fall of the Roman Empire , many of the classical Greek texts were translated into Arabic and preserved in the medieval Islamic world . The Greek classics along with Arabic science , philosophy and technology were transmitted to Western Europe and translated into Latin , sparking

31458-464: The judged proposition is true or false. Various theories of judgment have been proposed. The traditionally dominant approach is the combination theory. It states that judgments consist in the combination of concepts. On this view, to judge that "all men are mortal" is to combine the concepts "man" and "mortal". The same concepts can be combined in different ways, corresponding to different forms of judgment, for example, as "some men are mortal" or "no man

31672-467: The kitchen. This way, a perception can confirm or refute a thought depending on whether the empty intuitions are later fulfilled or not. The mind–body problem concerns the explanation of the relationship that exists between minds , or mental processes, and bodily states or processes. The main aim of philosophers working in this area is to determine the nature of the mind and mental states/processes, and how—or even if—minds are affected by and can affect

31886-544: The language of thought hypothesis since it provides ways to close the gap between thought in the human brain and computational processes implemented by computers. The reason for this is that processes over representations that respect syntax and semantics, like inferences according to the modus ponens , can be implemented by physical systems using causal relations. The same linguistic systems may be implemented through different material systems, like brains or computers. In this way, computers can think . An important view in

32100-414: The law of contradiction, the law of excluded middle, and the principle of identity. Counterfactual thinking involves mental representations of non-actual situations and events in which the thinker tries to assess what would be the case if things had been different. Thought experiments often employ counterfactual thinking in order to illustrate theories or to test their plausibility. Critical thinking

32314-575: The level of semantics, the semantic content or the meaning of the compound representations should depend on the semantic contents of its constituents. A representational system is linguistically structured if it fulfills these two requirements. The language of thought hypothesis states that the same is true for thinking in general. This would mean that thought is composed of certain atomic representational constituents that can be combined as described above. Apart from this abstract characterization, no further concrete claims are made about how human thought

32528-565: The literary traditions of Europe, as well as North America, Oceania and Latin America. While epic literary works in verse such as the Mahabharata and Homer's Iliad are ancient and occurred worldwide, the prose novel as a distinct form of storytelling, with developed, consistent human characters and, typically, some connected overall plot (although both of these characteristics have sometimes been modified and played with in later times),

32742-436: The logical form of thought. For example, to think that it will either rain or snow, it is not sufficient to instantiate the essences of rain and snow or to evoke the corresponding concepts. The reason for this is that the disjunctive relation between the rain and the snow is not captured this way. Another problem shared by these positions is the difficulty of giving a satisfying account of how essences or concepts are learned by

32956-439: The major impact of the Industrial Revolution was that the standard of living for the general population began to increase consistently for the first time in history, although others have said that it did not begin to meaningfully improve until the late 19th and 20th centuries. The precise start and end of the Industrial Revolution is still debated among historians, as is the pace of economic and social changes. GDP per capita

33170-519: The marks or notes or remembrance are called " Signes " by Hobbes. Going further back, although Aristotle is a source of the idea that only humans have reason ( logos ), he does mention that animals with imagination, for whom sense perceptions can persist, come closest to having something like reasoning and nous , and even uses the word " logos " in one place to describe the distinctions which animals can perceive in such cases. Reason and imagination rely on similar mental processes . Imagination

33384-555: The meantime. In such cases, the cognitive labor needed to arrive at a solution is often explained in terms of unconscious thoughts. The central idea is that a cognitive transition happened and we need to posit unconscious thoughts to be able to explain how it happened. It has been argued that conscious and unconscious thoughts differ not just concerning their relation to experience but also concerning their capacities. According to unconscious thought theorists , for example, conscious thought excels at simple problems with few variables but

33598-415: The mental processes which mediate between stimulus and response. They study various aspects of thinking, including the psychology of reasoning , and how people make decisions and choices, solve problems, as well as engage in creative discovery and imaginative thought. Cognitive theory contends that solutions to problems either take the form of algorithms : rules that are not necessarily understood but promise

33812-426: The mental states which either belong to an individual or are common among a certain group of people. Discussions of thought in the academic literature often leave it implicit which sense of the term they have in mind. The word thought comes from Old English þoht , or geþoht , from the stem of þencan "to conceive of in the mind, consider". Various theories of thinking have been proposed. They aim to capture

34026-466: The mind alone will always leave us with the mind–body problem which cannot be solved. Psychologists have concentrated on thinking as an intellectual exertion aimed at finding an answer to a question or the solution of a practical problem. Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that investigates internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language; all of which are used in thinking. The school of thought arising from this approach

34240-415: The mind is able to think about something by instantiating the essence of the object of thought. So while thinking about trees, the mind instantiates tree-ness. This instantiation does not happen in matter, as is the case for actual trees, but in mind, though the universal essence instantiated in both cases is the same. In contrast to Platonism, these universals are not understood as Platonic forms existing in

34454-445: The mind through abstraction. Inner speech theories claim that thinking is a form of inner speech . This view is sometimes termed psychological nominalism . It states that thinking involves silently evoking words and connecting them to form mental sentences. The knowledge a person has of their thoughts can be explained as a form of overhearing one's own silent monologue. Three central aspects are often ascribed to inner speech: it

34668-432: The most favorable one. Decision theory is a formal model of how ideal rational agents would make decisions. It is based on the idea that they should always choose the alternative with the highest expected value. Each alternative can lead to various possible outcomes, each of which has a different value. The expected value of an alternative consists in the sum of the values of each outcome associated with it multiplied by

34882-527: The object is presented through sensory contents. Empty intentions , on the other hand, present their object in a more abstract manner without the help of sensory contents. So when perceiving a sunset, it is presented through sensory contents. The same sunset can also be presented non-intuitively when merely thinking about it without the help of sensory contents. In these cases, the same properties are ascribed to objects. The difference between these modes of presentation concerns not what properties are ascribed to

35096-432: The object of thought. These universals are abstracted from sense experience and are not understood as existing in a changeless intelligible world, in contrast to Platonism. Conceptualism is closely related to Aristotelianism: it identifies thinking with mentally evoking concepts instead of instantiating essences. Inner speech theories claim that thinking is a form of inner speech in which words are silently expressed in

35310-407: The one hand, divergent thinking aims at coming up with as many alternative solutions as possible. On the other hand, convergent thinking tries to narrow down the range of alternatives to the most promising candidates. Some researchers identify various steps in the process of problem solving. These steps include recognizing the problem, trying to understand its nature, identifying general criteria

35524-597: The origin of the Western and European identity can be traced back to the 8th-century Muslim invasion of Europe via Iberia , when Christians would start to form a common Christian or European identity. Contemporary Latin chronicles from Spain referred to the victors in the Frankish victory over the Umayyads at the 732 Battle of Tours as "Europeans" according to Appiah, denoting a shared sense of identity. A former, now less-acceptable synonym for "Western civilisation"

35738-484: The other hand, investigates the development of thought from birth to maturity and asks which factors this development depends on. Psychoanalysis emphasizes the role of the unconscious in mental life. Other fields concerned with thought include linguistics , neuroscience , artificial intelligence , biology , and sociology . Various concepts and theories are closely related to the topic of thought. The term " law of thought " refers to three fundamental laws of logic:

35952-404: The other who does not. The idea behind this example is that both listeners hear the same sounds and therefore have the same non-cognitive experience. In order to explain the difference, a distinctive cognitive phenomenology has to be posited: only the experience of the first person has this additional cognitive character since it is accompanied by a thought that corresponds to the meaning of what

36166-434: The other. In this sense, the history of an organism's experience determines which thoughts the organism has and how these thoughts unfold. But such an association does not guarantee that the connection is meaningful or rational. For example, because of the association between the terms "cold" and "Idaho", the thought "this coffee shop is cold" might lead to the thought "Russia should annex Idaho". One form of associationism

36380-399: The past are relived. It is a form of mental time travel in which the past experience is re-experienced. But this does not constitute an exact copy of the original experience since the episodic memory involves additional aspects and information not present in the original experience. This includes both a feeling of familiarity and chronological information about the past event in relation to

36594-503: The perceiver is surprised. There is disagreement as to whether these pre-predicative aspects of regular perception should be understood as a form of cognitive phenomenology involving thinking. This issue is also important for understanding the relation between thought and language. The reason for this is that the pre-predicative expectations do not depend on language, which is sometimes taken as an example for non-linguistic thought. Various theorists have argued that pre-predicative experience

36808-414: The pie is tasty does not automatically lead to eating the pie, since various other mental states may still inhibit this behavior, for example, the belief that it would be impolite to do so or that the pie is poisoned. Computationalist theories of thinking, often found in the cognitive sciences, understand thinking as a form of information processing. These views developed with the rise of computers in

37022-399: The premises to the thought of the conclusion. Various laws of association have been suggested. According to the laws of similarity and contrast, ideas tend to evoke other ideas that are either very similar to them or their opposite. The law of contiguity, on the other hand, states that if two ideas were frequently experienced together, then the experience of one tends to cause the experience of

37236-532: The present. Memory aims at representing how things actually were in the past, in contrast to imagination, which presents objects without aiming to show how things actually are or were. Because of this missing link to actuality, more freedom is involved in most forms of imagination: its contents can be freely varied, changed, and recombined to create new arrangements never experienced before. Episodic memory and imagination have in common with other forms of thought that they can arise internally without any stimulation of

37450-424: The presented object but how the object is presented. Because of this commonality, it is possible for representations belonging to different modes to overlap or to diverge. For example, when searching one's glasses one may think to oneself that one left them on the kitchen table. This empty intention of the glasses lying on the kitchen table are then intuitively fulfilled when one sees them lying there upon arriving in

37664-465: The probability that this outcome occurs. According to decision theory, a decision is rational if the agent chooses the alternative associated with the highest expected value, as assessed from the agent's own perspective. Various theorists emphasize the practical nature of thought, i.e. that thinking is usually guided by some kind of task it aims to solve. In this sense, thinking has been compared to trial-and-error seen in animal behavior when faced with

37878-601: The problem and work with more complex representations whereas novices tend to devote more time to executing putative solutions. Deliberation is an important form of practical thinking. It aims at formulating possible courses of action and assessing their value by considering the reasons for and against them. This involves foresight to anticipate what might happen. Based on this foresight, different courses of action can be formulated in order to influence what will happen. Decisions are an important part of deliberation. They are about comparing alternative courses of action and choosing

38092-509: The process of concept formation . In the case of problem solving , thinking aims at reaching a predefined goal by overcoming certain obstacles. Deliberation is an important form of practical thought that consists in formulating possible courses of action and assessing the reasons for and against them. This may lead to a decision by choosing the most favorable option. Both episodic memory and imagination present objects and situations internally, in an attempt to accurately reproduce what

38306-421: The question "How should I live?" Instead, the unity of reason has to be strictly formal, or "procedural". He thus described reason as a group of three autonomous spheres (on the model of Kant's three critiques): For Habermas, these three spheres are the domain of experts, and therefore need to be mediated with the " lifeworld " by philosophers. In drawing such a picture of reason, Habermas hoped to demonstrate that

38520-505: The re-forming boundaries between East and West. In the Catholic or Frankish west, Roman law became the foundation on which all legal concepts and systems were based. Its influence is found in all Western legal systems, although in different manners and to different extents. The study of canon law , the legal system of the Catholic Church, fused with that of Roman law to form the basis of the refounding of Western legal scholarship. During

38734-519: The relation between language and thought. One prominent version in contemporary philosophy is called the language of thought hypothesis . It states that thinking happens in the medium of a mental language. This language, often referred to as Mentalese , is similar to regular languages in various respects: it is composed of words that are connected to each other in syntactic ways to form sentences. This claim does not merely rest on an intuitive analogy between language and thought. Instead, it provides

38948-401: The representation of objects without any propositions, as when someone is thinking about their grandmother. Reasoning is one of the most paradigmatic forms of thinking. It is the process of drawing conclusions from premises or evidence. Types of reasoning can be divided into deductive and non-deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is governed by certain rules of inference , which guarantee

39162-479: The researcher but merely inferred from the subject's intelligent behavior. This remains true to the general behaviorist principle that behavioral evidence is required for any psychological hypothesis. One problem for behaviorism is that the same entity often behaves differently despite being in the same situation as before. This problem consists in the fact that individual thoughts or mental states usually do not correspond to one particular behavior. So thinking that

39376-444: The rules by which reason operates are the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle , especially Prior Analytics and Posterior Analytics . Although the Ancient Greeks had no separate word for logic as distinct from language and reason, Aristotle's newly coined word " syllogism " ( syllogismos ) identified logic clearly for the first time as a distinct field of study. When Aristotle referred to "the logical" ( hē logikē ), he

39590-538: The same " laws of nature " which affect inanimate things. This new understanding eventually displaced the previous world view that derived from a spiritual understanding of the universe. Accordingly, in the 17th century, René Descartes explicitly rejected the traditional notion of humans as "rational animals", suggesting instead that they are nothing more than "thinking things" along the lines of other "things" in nature. Any grounds of knowledge outside that understanding was, therefore, subject to doubt. In his search for

39804-424: The same way by many different systems, including humans, animals, and even robots. According to one such view, whether something is a thought only depends on its role "in producing further internal states and verbal outputs". Representationalism, on the other hand, focuses on the representational features of mental states and defines thoughts as sequences of intentional mental states. In this sense, computationalism

40018-419: The scientific revolution, and its completion is attributed to the "grand synthesis" of Newton's 1687 Principia . The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. This included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, improved efficiency of water power ,

40232-408: The second part of the 20th century, when various theorists saw thinking in analogy to computer operations. On such views, the information may be encoded differently in the brain, but in principle, the same operations take place there as well, corresponding to the storage, transmission, and processing of information. But while this analogy has some intuitive attraction, theorists have struggled to give

40446-434: The secular authorities. The Jewish Christian tradition out of which it had emerged was all but extinguished, and antisemitism became increasingly entrenched or even integral to Christendom. Much of art and literature, law, education, and politics were preserved in the teachings of the Church. In a broader sense, the Middle Ages , with its fertile encounter between Greek philosophical reasoning and Levantine monotheism

40660-413: The sensory organs. But they are still closer to sensation than more abstract forms of thought since they present sensory contents that could, at least in principle, also be perceived. Conscious thought is the paradigmatic form of thinking and is often the focus of the corresponding research. But it has been argued that some forms of thought also happen on the unconscious level . Unconscious thought

40874-417: The sentence but cannot entertain the corresponding proposition. Concept formation is a form of thinking in which new concepts are acquired. It involves becoming familiar with the characteristic features shared by all instances of the corresponding type of entity and developing the ability to identify positive and negative cases. This process usually corresponds to learning the meaning of the word associated with

41088-404: The solution should meet, deciding how these criteria should be prioritized, monitoring the progress, and evaluating the results. An important distinction concerns the type of problem that is faced. For well-structured problems , it is easy to determine which steps need to be taken to solve them, but executing these steps may still be difficult. For ill-structured problems, on the other hand, it

41302-532: The stage for the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, which fundamentally altered religious and political life. Led by figures like Martin Luther , Protestantism challenged the authority of the Catholic Church and promoted ideas of individual freedom and religious reform , paving the way for modern notions of personal responsibility and governance. The Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries shifted focus to reason , science , and individual rights , influencing revolutions across Europe and

41516-428: The storage, transmission, and processing of information. Various types of thinking are discussed in academic literature. A judgment is a mental operation in which a proposition is evoked and then either affirmed or denied. Reasoning , on the other hand, is the process of drawing conclusions from premises or evidence. Both judging and reasoning depend on the possession of the relevant concepts, which are acquired in

41730-543: The substantive unity of reason, which in pre-modern societies had been able to answer questions about the good life, could be made up for by the unity of reason's formalizable procedures. Hamann , Herder , Kant , Hegel , Kierkegaard , Nietzsche , Heidegger , Foucault , Rorty , and many other philosophers have contributed to a debate about what reason means, or ought to mean. Some, like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Rorty, are skeptical about subject-centred, universal, or instrumental reason, and even skeptical toward reason as

41944-430: The succession of ideas or images. They are particularly interested in the laws of association that govern how the train of thought unfolds. Behaviorists , by contrast, identify thinking with behavioral dispositions to engage in public intelligent behavior as a reaction to particular external stimuli . Computationalism is the most recent of these theories. It sees thinking in analogy to how computers work in terms of

42158-417: The term "mind". This usage is encountered, for example, in the Cartesian tradition , where minds are understood as thinking things, and in the cognitive sciences . But this sense may include the restriction that such processes have to lead to intelligent behavior to be considered thought. A contrast sometimes found in the academic literature is that between thinking and feeling . In this context, thinking

42372-464: The thinker's mind. According to some accounts, this happens in a regular language, like English or French. The language of thought hypothesis , on the other hand, holds that this happens in the medium of a unique mental language called Mentalese . Central to this idea is that linguistic representational systems are built up from atomic and compound representations and that this structure is also found in thought. Associationists understand thinking as

42586-401: The truth of the conclusion if the premises are true. For example, given the premises "all men are mortal" and "Socrates is a man", it follows deductively that "Socrates is mortal". Non-deductive reasoning, also referred to as defeasible reasoning or non-monotonic reasoning , is still rationally compelling but the truth of the conclusion is not ensured by the truth of the premises. Induction

42800-413: The type in question. There are various theories concerning how concepts and concept possession are to be understood. The use of metaphor may aid in the processes of concept formation. According to one popular view, concepts are to be understood in terms of abilities . On this view, two central aspects characterize concept possession: the ability to discriminate between positive and negative cases and

43014-411: The understanding of reason, starting in Europe . One of the most important of these changes involved a change in the metaphysical understanding of human beings. Scientists and philosophers began to question the teleological understanding of the world. Nature was no longer assumed to be human-like, with its own aims or reason, and human nature was no longer assumed to work according to anything other than

43228-406: The western part of the old empire. However, this would become the center of a new West. Europe fell into political anarchy, with many warring kingdoms and principalities. Under the Frankish kings, it eventually, and partially, reunified, and the anarchy evolved into feudalism . Much of the basis of the post-Roman cultural world had been set before the fall of the Western Roman Empire, mainly through

43442-425: The word. It also does not mean that humans acting on the basis of experience or habit are using their reason. Human reason requires more than being able to associate two ideas—even if those two ideas might be described by a reasoning human as a cause and an effect—perceptions of smoke, for example, and memories of fire. For reason to be involved, the association of smoke and the fire would have to be thought through in

43656-402: The words " logos ", " ratio ", " raison " and "reason" as interchangeable. The meaning of the word "reason" in senses such as "human reason" also overlaps to a large extent with " rationality " and the adjective of "reason" in philosophical contexts is normally " rational ", rather than "reasoned" or "reasonable". Some philosophers, Hobbes for example, also used the word ratiocination as

43870-416: The work of Heidegger , Piaget , Vygotsky , Merleau-Ponty and the pragmatist John Dewey . This approach states that the classical approach of separating the mind and analysing its processes is misguided: instead, we should see that the mind, actions of an embodied agent, and the environment it perceives and envisions, are all parts of a whole which determine each other. Therefore, functional analysis of

44084-437: The world through explorers and missionaries during the Age of Discovery , and by imperialists from the 17th century to the early 20th century. During the Great Divergence , a term coined by Samuel Huntington the Western world overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged during the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilization of the time, eclipsing Qing China , Mughal India , Tokugawa Japan , and

44298-416: Was "the white race ". As Europeans discovered the extra-European world, old concepts adapted. The area that had formerly been considered the Orient ("the East") became the Near East as the interests of the European powers interfered with Meiji Japan and Qing China for the first time in the 19th century. Thus the Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895 occurred in the " Far East " while troubles surrounding

44512-444: Was broadly stable before the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the modern capitalist economy, while the Industrial Revolution began an era of per-capita economic growth in capitalist economies. Economic historians are in agreement that the onset of the Industrial Revolution is the most important event in the history of humanity since the domestication of animals, plants and fire. The First Industrial Revolution evolved into

44726-422: Was created in the East in his capital of Constantinople, and that city maintained trade and intermittent political control over outposts such as Venice in the West for centuries. Classical Greek learning was also subsumed, preserved, and elaborated in the rising Eastern world, which gradually supplanted Roman-Byzantine control as a dominant cultural-political force. Thus, much of the learning of classical antiquity

44940-462: Was not confined to the West but also stretched into the old East. The philosophy and science of Classical Greece were largely forgotten in Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, other than in isolated monastic enclaves (notably in Ireland, which had become Christian but was never conquered by Rome). The learning of Classical Antiquity was better preserved in the Eastern Roman Empire. Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis Roman civil law code

45154-437: Was previously experienced or as a free rearrangement, respectively. Unconscious thought is thought that happens without being directly experienced. It is sometimes posited to explain how difficult problems are solved in cases where no conscious thought was employed. Thought is discussed in various academic disciplines. Phenomenology is interested in the experience of thinking. An important question in this field concerns

45368-420: Was readily adopted by the early Church as the Church Fathers saw Greek Philosophy as an indispensable instrument given to mankind so that we may understand revelation. For example, the greatest among the early Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church such as Augustine of Hippo , Basil of Caesarea , and Gregory of Nyssa were as much Neoplatonic philosophers as they were Christian theologians, and they adopted

45582-411: Was referring more broadly to rational thought. As pointed out by philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, some animals are also clearly capable of a type of " associative thinking ", even to the extent of associating causes and effects. A dog once kicked, can learn how to recognize the warning signs and avoid being kicked in the future, but this does not mean the dog has reason in any strict sense of

45796-449: Was slowly reintroduced to European civilization in the centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The Medieval West referred specifically to the Catholic "Latin" West, also called "Frankish" during Charlemagne 's reign, in contrast to the Orthodox East, where Greek remained the language of the Byzantine Empire. After the fall of Rome , much of Greco-Roman art, literature, science and even technology were all but lost in

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