Thinking and learning to think by Nathan C. Schaeffer (ebooks that read to you .txt) đź“–
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Clifford compares two well-known achievements in the domain of astronomy which help to set the distinction between technical and scientific thought in a still clearer light:
“Ancient astronomers observed that the relative motions of the sun and moon recurred all over again in the same order every nineteen years. They were thus enabled to predict the time at which eclipses would take place. A calculator at one of our great observatories can do a great deal more than this. Like them, he makes use of past experience to predict the future; but he knows of a great number of other cycles besides the one of nineteen years, and takes account of all of them; and he can tell about the solar eclipse of six years hence, exactly when it will be visible, and how much of the sun’s surface will be covered at each place, and to a second at what time of the day it will begin and finish there. This prediction involves technical skill of the highest order, but it does not involve scientific thought, as any astronomer will tell you. By such calculations the place of the planet Uranus at different times of the year had been predicted and set down. The predictions were not fulfilled. Then arose Adams, and from the errors in the prediction he calculated the place of an entirely new planet that had never yet been suspected; and you all know how the new planet was actually found in that place. Now this prediction does involve scientific thought, as any one who has studied it will tell you. Here, then, are two cases of thought about the same subject, both predicting events by the application of previous experience, yet we say one is technical and the other scientific.”[45]
The foregoing distinction may be valuable in the training of university students whose career is to be that of original research and discovery, but it has very little value for teachers in schools of lower grade. For ordinary purposes, science is the knowledge of things in their causes and relations. If the teacher begets the habit of asking why, and makes the pupils dissatisfied with simply knowing the how and the what, he has gone far towards making them thinkers in the scientific sense of the word.
How shall the knowledge of things in their causes and relations be attained? The mind first thinks things as isolated units apart from and without reference to other things. Under the impulse to know it resolves the thing into its elements or constituent parts, and then puts them together in a more complete idea of each thing as a whole. The boy whose curiosity impels him to take apart a watch or clock is following the bent of the mind to proceed analytically. If he does not try to put the pieces together, so that the reconstructed whole will keep time as before, he needs stimulus in the direction of synthetic thinking. Soon his interest in time-pieces leads him to detect similarities between American watches and those made in Switzerland, and he learns to classify time-pieces, to see a multitude of details and peculiarities at a glance, one characteristic or peculiarity bringing to his mind the distinctive parts and construction of every watch in a given class. From the way in which a given watch keeps time, he draws inferences in regard to the entire class. This is inductive thinking. From the conclusions he has framed, he makes up his mind as to the new watch which the jeweller offers him for sale. He is now thinking deductively.
From thinking things as units, the mind passes to thinking the relations of things. The adaptation of means to ends in play, in ministering to bodily wants, occupies the mind in very early stages of thinking. The gifts of the kindergarten appeal to this tendency in the mind, and help to develop it into habit and faculty. Design and its execution, means and end, the tool and its use, the raw material and the purpose for which it is to be used, thought-material and the essay in which it is to be formulated,—these are so many ways of thinking things or ideas in their relations. Not only may a relation become a distinct object of thought, but relations between relations, classes of relations,—for instance, in simple and compound proportion,—can thus be made to stand apart before the mind as distinct objects of thought. The most important of all these relations is that of cause and effect. How things come to be, their origin and development, the forces that make them what they are, are the questions of profound and abiding interest to the scientific mind. Laws are often spoken of as if they were causes. A law is a generalized statement of an invariable sequence of things or motions of things. We sometimes personify these sequences, and speak of them as if they were forces in nature. The laws are personified, as if they were conscious beings demanding obedience, and inflicting punishment for disobedience. The consciousness of the personification is lost, and then along with spelling nature with a capital letter, we fall into the mistake of making laws stand for the Maker and Creator of all things. Furthermore, it is very important to distinguish the ground of knowledge from causes that are operative in the world outside of mind. The rain of last night caused the streets to be muddy; but the condition of the streets, an effect of rainfall, may be the ground of our knowledge that it must have rained last night. The fact that the earth is flattened at the poles, or, in other words, that its curvature is less at the poles than at the equator, explains the fact that degrees of latitude get longer as we approach the poles. The former is the cause, the latter is an effect. But the mind drew the former as an inference from the determination of degrees of latitude by actual measurement. The effect became the ground of knowledge. Frequently the cause is known or inferred from its effect. That which is causal in the world of mind is effect in the world outside of mind; and that which is effect in nature becomes the ground of knowledge in the processes of thought. From this point as vantage-ground, we spy the land in which thinking becomes knowing.
XVIITHINKING AND KNOWING
When a man’s knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion of thought. When the facts are not organized into faculty, the greater the mass of them the more will the mind stagger along under its burden, hampered instead of helped by its acquisitions.
H. Spencer.
That knowledge cannot be gained without more or less of correct and prolonged thinking is a practical maxim which no one would be found to dispute. But that there is much knowledge which does not come by mere thinking is a maxim scarcely more to be held in doubt. Thinking is, then, universally recognized as an important and even necessary part of knowing; but it is not the whole of knowing. Or, in other words, one must make use of one’s faculties of thought as an indispensable means to cognition; but there are other means which must also be employed, since it is not by thought alone that the human mind attains cognition.
Ladd’s “Philosophy of Knowledge,” page 130.
XVIITHINKING AND KNOWING
One morning a teacher was awakened by a noise, the like of which he had never heard and hopes never to hear again. It was unlike anything in his former experience. Soon he began to distinguish the hissing of steam and the moaning of men, but the cause was still a mystery. Later, he learned that the blast furnace in the neighborhood had exploded, and that several men were killed and others had been seriously injured by the explosion.
The cause of the noise could not be inferred, because there was nothing in his former experience with which it could be compared. The escaping steam and the voices of the suffering workmen were recognized because they could be interpreted in the light of what he had seen and heard before. In order that any one may derive definite knowledge from sense-impressions, there must be something in past experience to give meaning to the new experience.
Observation that issues in knowing is coupled with a process of thought in which the new perception is linked to the ideas which the mind brings to the perception. In other words, observation always involves the element of thinking; without thinking, sense-impressions cannot give us knowledge.
Knowing is impossible without thinking, and yet not all thinking gives ripe to knowing. What is the relation between the two?
Knowledge has been defined as firm belief in what is true on sufficient ground. The explanation of this definition which Locke gives is well known to every student of philosophy. “If any one is in doubt respecting one of Euclid’s demonstrations, he cannot be said to know the proposition proved by it; if again he is fully convinced of anything that is not true, he is mistaken in supposing himself to know it; lastly, if two persons are each fully confident, one that the moon is inhabited, and the other that it is not (though one of these opinions must be true), neither of them could properly be said to know the truth, since he cannot have sufficient proof of it.”[46]
The foregoing definition consists of three parts,—1, firm belief; 2, in what is true; 3, on sufficient ground. In common parlance, belief is distinguished from knowledge, the latter implying a higher degree of assurance than the former. In some treatises on psychology belief denotes all forms of assent, including the highest possible certainty and conviction. The expression firm belief excludes the element of doubt from knowledge.
Truth, according to the etymology of the word, signifies that which the mind trows or believes to be fact or reality. It has its source in God, whilst knowledge proceeds from man. To be true, a proposition must be in exact accordance with what is or has been or shall be. Truth exists apart from the cognitions of the human mind. It would continue to exist if the mind of man were blotted out of existence, and there was truth long before the intelligence of man was called into being. The aim of thinking is to find out and lay hold of the truth. Thinking in which truth and error are mixed may have value as partial knowledge and as a stepping-stone to fuller knowledge. Knowledge becomes full and complete only in so far as it contains the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
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