What does thinking mean?

Definition of thinking: \x0d\ thinking is an indirect and general reflection of objective reality. Objective things directly act on people's sensory organs, producing feelings and perceptions. Feeling and perception reflect the individual attributes of things or individual things with perceptual images, so that people can grasp the external relations of various phenomena and things. Thinking is a more advanced cognitive process based on feeling and perception. It uses intellectual operations such as analysis, synthesis and abstract generalization to process sensory information, and reflects the essence and internal relations of things with the knowledge stored in memory as the medium. This kind of reflection is in the form of concept, judgment and reasoning, which is indirect and general. For example, when people see all kinds of bungalows and high-rise buildings, they can form the concept of house through thinking, which summarizes the same essence of all bungalows and high-rise buildings. People can see the sun shining on the rock and feel the rock getting hot through the skin. However, the causal relationship between sunlight exposure and rock heating is beyond the grasp of feeling and perception, and it is necessary to further use relevant knowledge for judgment and reasoning and indirect understanding. This indirect and general reflection of objective things enables people to understand things that do not directly act on the sensory organs and grasp the essence and laws of things. When people master the nature and laws of things, they can foresee the future changes and development of things and then actively transform the world. Whether people's thinking correctly reflects objective things should be tested by practice. \x0d\ Thinking activities can be caused by external things or things in memory. Generally speaking, when people need to complete a task without ready-made means, thinking activities are triggered and carried out in the direction guided by the task. In other words, thinking activities are caused by certain problems and point to the solutions to the problems. This kind of thinking activity is called goal-oriented thinking. It is controlled by consciousness and is the dominant thinking activity of human beings. There is also a kind of thinking activity that has no clear purpose, is rarely controlled by consciousness and has the nature of spontaneous association, which is called associative thinking. Thinking is manifested in acquiring knowledge and applying knowledge to solve problems. \x0d\ Relationship between thinking and language: \x0d\ Thinking is closely related to language. Many psychologists believe that language is not only a means for people to exchange ideas, but also a tool for normal people to think. Concept is the basic factor of thinking, but concept is expressed in words. For example, the concept of a house is expressed by the word "house". The word "house" exists alone in the form of symbols, which marks all kinds of bungalows and high-rise buildings and has generality. These characteristics of words make it possible to reflect indirectly and generally. When people are thinking, the activities of speech organs are suppressed, and what works is a silent speech, that is, the inner speech, with which to think. Pavlov's theory distinguishes the first signal system from the second signal system, and thinks that thinking is the activity of the second signal system stimulated by words. \ x0d \ j.b. Watson, a representative figure of behavioral psychology, equates thinking with words. He regards thinking as the movement of the larynx, and the larynx is only weak. Indeed, people's thinking is accompanied by the activities of speech organs. For example, when doing calculation or other thinking tasks silently, you can record the muscle changes of speech organs, and the activities of speech organs recorded when reading and reciting the same poem respectively have similar properties. Even deaf people who use sign language can find that when they think, they also have a weak hand muscle response and their muscles change. These experimental results show that thinking and speech are related, but they do not prove that thinking and speech can be equated. The experiment found that normal people can say "la, la, la" when calculating or reading, or bite their tongues with their upper and lower teeth when translating a foreign language silently, so as to interfere with the internal speech during thinking activities. Although thinking activities are sometimes adversely affected, they can still complete the prescribed homework. \ x0d \1947 s.m. Smith and others conducted an experiment: Smith himself was injected with curare, and his whole body (including the whole speech and pronunciation organs) was paralyzed, relying on artificial respiration devices and other medical equipment to maintain his life. After the paralysis disappeared and his function returned to normal, Smith reported that during the whole paralysis, his consciousness was not disturbed and his thinking activities could still be carried out as usual. He can understand the questions put to him and recall them afterwards. This experiment strongly shows that thinking and speech cannot be equated, and even speech is not a necessary factor of thinking. \ x0d \ Since 1970s, the research on schizencephaly has provided the same data. Under normal circumstances, the two hemispheres of the human brain are connected by the corpus callosum, and the two hemispheres work together, but their functions are different. Usually, the right-handed person has the function of speaking and writing in the left hemisphere of the brain, but not in the right hemisphere. After the corpus callosum was injured or cut off by surgery, the two hemispheres worked independently of each other. But the separated right hemisphere can still understand the names of some things said or written. The right hemisphere can also perform simple addition or multiplication operations. These facts also show that the right hemisphere without speech function still has a certain thinking function, and thinking does not need words as a tool. \x0d\ Many experimental results show that thinking can't be equated with words, and thinking doesn't have to use words as tools. In real life, deaf people who have not mastered spoken English can still think. From the perspective of human psychological development, babies also have certain thinking ability when they have not learned to speak or just started to babble. According to J Piaget, the premise of learning a language is to develop a certain thinking ability. Nevertheless, the facts quoted above do not deny that under normal circumstances, people use words to carry out thinking activities. It can be said that the characteristics of abstraction and generalization of words and grammatical rules make language suitable as a tool of thinking. So that people's thinking activities become more effective. Some scholars, such as B.L. Wolf, emphasize the decisive role of language in thinking. They believe that the structure of language determines the process and content of thinking, and languages of different nationalities have their own characteristics of thinking. This view is called the principle of relative action of language or Wolf hypothesis.