The simplest way of speaking about thinking is as an internal conversation (usually, I suspect, if not necessarily, a dialogue). You begin by taking issue with what someone has said and if you can produce for yourself what they might say back to you you are thinking. The quality of your thinking is then a result of the range and quality of the interlocutors you can imagine for yourself. Reading, of course, is what enables you to move beyond narrow and stereotyped modes of thinking and, even more so, writing, which allows you to look at sentence after sentence and consider ways one might take issue with each and every one. But a range of scenes must be imaginable as well: for many, if not most, the reading and writing they do is on some institutional scene of education, in which case the kinds of responses to your statements will be restricted to those you imagine coming from your teacher in the context of some kind of assessment. If you can’t imagine yourself on other scenes, you will forever be striving to be an A student, which does mean getting good at certain things that bring certain rewards, but is not really thinking. A sign that you’re getting pretty good as a thinker is that you can entertain highly unlikely, even nonsensical, claims, for the sake of seeing what else you would have to be willing to say to defend them. At this point, you’re creating whole new scenes, scenes that could never really exist, rather than just rehearsing the intellectual moves that will raise your prestige (or, more bleakly, ensure your survival) in already established settings. And it’s also likely that at this point you’re having fun.
Wisdom as Searching the Central Intelligence
Wisdom as Searching the Central Intelligence
Wisdom as Searching the Central Intelligence
The simplest way of speaking about thinking is as an internal conversation (usually, I suspect, if not necessarily, a dialogue). You begin by taking issue with what someone has said and if you can produce for yourself what they might say back to you you are thinking. The quality of your thinking is then a result of the range and quality of the interlocutors you can imagine for yourself. Reading, of course, is what enables you to move beyond narrow and stereotyped modes of thinking and, even more so, writing, which allows you to look at sentence after sentence and consider ways one might take issue with each and every one. But a range of scenes must be imaginable as well: for many, if not most, the reading and writing they do is on some institutional scene of education, in which case the kinds of responses to your statements will be restricted to those you imagine coming from your teacher in the context of some kind of assessment. If you can’t imagine yourself on other scenes, you will forever be striving to be an A student, which does mean getting good at certain things that bring certain rewards, but is not really thinking. A sign that you’re getting pretty good as a thinker is that you can entertain highly unlikely, even nonsensical, claims, for the sake of seeing what else you would have to be willing to say to defend them. At this point, you’re creating whole new scenes, scenes that could never really exist, rather than just rehearsing the intellectual moves that will raise your prestige (or, more bleakly, ensure your survival) in already established settings. And it’s also likely that at this point you’re having fun.