This document discusses human thought and reason. It explores the nature of thoughts and how rational cognition allows humans to have great intellectual achievements. Rational thought is not different in kind between routine tasks like basic math problems and more complex achievements in science and art. Thoughts can be composed of ideas or concepts, and language allows the communication of thoughts between individuals and the formation of society. Reasoning is an ongoing process of building arguments from basic beliefs through perception.

1. Philosophy in Education

2. Thought and Reason
What distinguishes human beings apart from other
animals is their capacity for making and developing
thought. Only human beings are capable of the
kinds of cognition required to build an airplane or a
microwave oven, to write Hamlet or compose a
symphony, to propound the Theory of Relativity or
discover DNA.

3. Thought and Reason
The term "thought" is normally used to refer to
either occurrent beliefs or to a more general class of
mental events that includes our entertaining ideas
without mentally endorsing them. In the latter sense
thoughts may include hypotheses, fears, musings,
daydreams, and so on. So thoughts are beliefs, but
most beliefs are not thoughts.

4. Thought and Reason
What we want is to understand rational thought,
from the routine to the sublime. We want to know
how it is possible for us to accomplish the epistemic
tasks upon whose results we base our lives and
which other creatures find so impossible. We want
to understand human beings as cognizers.

5. Thought and Reason
Cognitive psychology investigates certain aspects of
human cognition through the methods of science.
But our interest here is in specifically rational
cognition. Psychologists study human thought when
it goes wrong as well as when it goes right, but we
want to know what it is for it to go right. What is it
that makes human beings rational, and thereby
makes our enormous intellectual achievements
possible?

6. Thought and Reason
Rational cognition includes more than the pursuit
of knowledge. Knowledge has a purpose. It is to
help us get around in the world. We use our
knowledge to guide us in deciding how to act, and
rational cognition includes the cognitive processes
involved in action decisions. Co-cognition is just a
fancy name for the everyday notion of thinking
about the same subject matter

7. Thought and Reason
One of the remarkable conclusions of contemporary
epistemology is that the rational thought responsible
for our great intellectual achievements is not different
in kind from the rational thought involved in routine
epistemic procedures. These are like determining the
color of an object seen in the daylight, remembering
your mother's name, or summing 12 and 25.

8. Thought and Reason
Gottlob Frege uses this term (thought) to describe
what is thought when someone thinks, rather than
the thinking of it. On his theory a Thought is the
Sense of a sentence
What is extraordinary about human thought is
already present in our ability to solve routine
epistemic problems.

9. Thought and Reason
Without communication of thought there can be no
society, and without society human beings miss out
on significant ‘comfort and advantage’; according
to another writer, their life without society is
‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. The
ultimate good furnished by language is the security
and prosperity provided by society; and language
promotes that by making communication possible.

10. Thought and Reason
What do we think thoughts are composed of? perhaps we
might say (using the word in an everyday sense) ideas, or
concepts – though we are unlikely to be clear what ideas
or concepts are. Generally speaking, we can think of John
Locke’s Ideas as like ideas, in the modern sense, or
concepts but we probably get closer to Locke if we think
of a Lockean Idea as a kind of mental image. Whatever
their nature, Locke was clear about one thing: Ideas are
‘invisible and hidden from others’.

11. Thought and Reason
Gottlob Frege thinks that language is concerned
with the communication of thoughts, and yet here
we find that he clearly has some kind of world-
oriented conception of language. This suggests that
the contrast between the two conceptions is not as
simple as it might initially have seemed.

12. Thought and Reason
If the notion of sense is what is needed to solve
Frege’s puzzle about informative identity
statements, it must be characterized by means of
Evans’s Intuitive Criterion of Difference. A true
sentence is informative if you can understand it
without thinking that it’s true. Two sentences differ
in informativeness if you can understand both
without thinking that they have the same truth-
value.

13. Thought and Reason
Fregean Thoughts are objective in two respects:
1. The same Thought can be grasped by different people.
2. Thoughts can exist independently of human beings.
For example: If I think that the morning star is a body
illuminated by the sun, and you think that the morning
star is a body illuminated by the sun, you and I think the
same Thought. And that Thought was there to be thought
before anyone actually thought it.

14. Thought and Reason
The first respect in which the difference between Lockean Ideas
and Fregean Thoughts ends up looking less than it might initially
seem is that Fregean thoughts seem more personal than his
official account might suggest. If different people have different
ways of picking out the same object, it seems that they will
associate a different Sense with any name of that object. What
this means is that in many cases it will be unlikely – and even
impossible– that two people will think the same Thought. This
leads to another difficulty. If different people can associate
different Senses with the same word, it seems obvious that it will
always be possible for the same person to associate different
Senses with different words.

15. Thought and Reason
The second respect in which it seems harder than it might have been
thought to maintain a firm contrast between Fregean Sense and
Lockean Ideas concerns the relation between Sense and reference. So,
as Locke’s theory allows room for reference at all, words refer to
things in the real world only indirectly: they stand, in the first place,
directly, for Ideas, and then, only indirectly, do they refer to things in
the world. This indirectness is particularly significant if we adopt a
traditional empiricist approach to Lockean Ideas. On this view, an
Idea is an image which is before our mind when we perceive
something. What we directly perceive are Ideas; that there is
something real in the world which is the cause of these Ideas in our
mind is something we can only infer. We could be viewing the same
Idea even if we were hallucinating.

16. Two Ways of Understanding Simulation Approach
The central aim of this part is to articulate and
recommend the idea that the simulationists view
about what is involved in grasp and use of
psychological concepts may be understood in two
different ways, namely as an a priori claim about
the relations of certain personal-level cognitive
abilities or as an a posteriori hypothesis about the
workings of sub-personal cognitive machinery.

17. Two Ways of Understanding Simulation Approach
A priori knowledge comprises one of the most problematic areas. It is
usually defined as "what is known independently of experience", or
perhaps as "what is known on the basis of reason alone".
There is the distinction between a posteriori and a priori truths:
between those which can only be known by observation and
experience, and those which can be known without observation or
experience. This distinction is concerned with how things can be
known: it is an epistemic distinction (concerned with knowledge,
rather than how things are). Also, this distinction was thought to
coincide: all a priori truths were thought to be necessary, and vice
versa; all a posteriori truths were thought to be contingent, and vice
versa.

18. Two Ways of Understanding Simulation Approach
Consider now the following claim:
A. It is an a priori truth that thinking about others’ thoughts
requires us, in usual and central cases, to think about the states
of affairs which are the subject matter of those thoughts, namely
to co-cognise with the person whose thoughts we seek to grasp.
B. It is an a posteriori truth that when we think about others’
thoughts we sometimes ‘unhook’ some of our cognitive
mechanisms so that they can run ‘off-line’ and then feed them
with ‘pretend’ versions of the sorts of thought we attribute to the
other.

19. Two Ways of Understanding Simulation Approach
(A) is the claim that co-cognition is important in
our dealings with other minds. (B) is the claim that
off-line simulation is the sub-personal process in
which such co-cognition is realized.

20. Reason
Reasoning is an occurrent process, so it might seem
as justification emerges from reasoning it can only
be thoughts that enter into considerations of
justification. A person becomes aware of his world
and builds up a picture of it, through perception,
memory and reasoning.

21. Reason
Reasoning is an occurrent process. It can proceed only in terms
of what we occurrently hold in mind. We do not have to hold the
entire argument in mind in order for it to justify its conclusion,
but we do have to hold each step in mind as we go through it.
There is also a practical reasoning system, which takes beliefs
and desires as input and produces intentions as output. practical
reasoning system and the like are the intrinsic properties of the
vehicles, the brain states or neuronal patterns, which are the
beliefs, desires and so forth.

22. Reason
Old arguments are extended as we continue to
reason from their conclusions, and new arguments
are added as we acquire new basic beliefs and
reason from them, but the old arguments do not
drop out of the picture just because we are no
longer thinking about them.

23. Reason
We have thus far implicitly adopted a kind of
"mental blackboard" picture of reasoning according
to which:
1. We have an orderly arrangement of
interconnected beliefs all available for simultaneous
inspection and evaluation.
2. Arguments are built out of these beliefs and are
evaluated by such inspection.

24. Reason
Reasoning can only justify us in holding a belief if we are
already justified in holding the beliefs from which we
reason, so reasoning cannot provide an ultimate source of
justification. Only perception can do that. We thus
acquire the picture of our beliefs forming a kind of
pyramid, with the basic beliefs provided by perception
forming the foundation, and all other justified beliefs
being supported by reasoning that traces back ultimately
to the basic beliefs.

25. Reason
Justification of beliefs by means of perception

26. References
• Heal Jane, Mind, Reason and Imagination: Selected Essays in Philosophy
of Mind and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, New
York 2003).
• Morris Michael, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, New York 2007).
• Pollock John L., and Cruz Joseph, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge
(Rowman and Littlefield Publishers).

27. Thank you for Listening