#how we think

[philosophybitmaps]

[quotessentially]

From John Dewey’s How We Think

[philosophybits]

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

John Dewey, How We Think

[robertogreco]

"I need to simplify my thinking: to come to the roots of the olive trees I have planted on my island, sit close to them, look at every leaf. Start early in the morning. Then close my eyes and let the morning sun touch my face. Go to the Mediterranean at the street corner, go into its water, its salt, its acid colors, its heat. Oh Lord, let’s stop thinking. Let’s just be, and for many hours in a row, merge with this vegetal and metallic kind of consciousness which is so overpowering."

—Etel Adnan, 1925–2021, RIP (photo by Claire Schwartz)

[keficafe]

My cis related a heterosexual: But i don’t understand why is it bad or why y’all do a big deal if it when it is not. (Talking about the LGBTA+ community)

Me:

[maaarine]

MBTI & Ideas

How We Think (John Dewey, 1910)

“Ashes not merely suggest a previous fire, but they signify there has been a fire, because ashes are produced by combustion and, if they are genuine ashes, only by combustion.

It is an objective connection, the link in actual things, that makes one thing the ground, warrant, evidence, for believing in something else. (...)

This function whereby one thing signifies or indicates an other, thus leading us to consider how far the one may be regarded as warrant for belief in the other, is, then, the central factor in all reflective or distinctively intellectual thinking. (...)

It commences when we begin to inquire into the reliability, the worth, of any particular indication; when we try to test its value and see what guarantee there is that the existing data really point to the idea that is suggested in such a way as to justify acceptance of the latter.”

——

“We may carry our account further by noting that reflective thinking, in distinction from other operations to which we apply the name of thought, involves (1) a state of doubt, hesitation, perplexity, mental difficulty, in which thinking originates, 

and (2) an act of searching, hunting, inquiring, to find material that will resolve the doubt, settle and dispose of the perplexity.”

——

“The mere occurrence of ideas or suggestions constitutes thinking, but not reflective thinking, not observation and thought directed to an acceptable conclusion —

that is, to a conclusion which it is reasonable to believe because of the grounds on which it rests and the evidence which supports it.

Ideas merely as such, apart from their orderly sequence, just ‘pop into our heads.’ ‘I just happened to think of something’ is often a perfectly accurate statement.

Another dimension is needed, accordingly, to transform suggestions into reflective thinking — the property of order, of consecutiveness.

There is no thinking without what is called ‘association of ideas’ or a train of suggestions. But such a train, of itself, does not constitute reflection.

Only when the succession is so controlled that it is an orderly sequence leading up to a conclusion that contains the intellectual force of the preceding ideas, do we have reflective thought.

And by ‘intellectual force’ is signified force in making some idea worthy of belief; in making it trustworthy.”

[philosophybitmaps]

[philosophybits]

Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective thought... It is a conscious and voluntary effort to establish belief upon a firm basis of reasons.

John Dewey, How We Think