Learning to Think

[jarofthoughts]

From an early age I’ve been intrigued by discussions and debates. The exchanges of intellectual blows have always fascinated me, and I’ve thus far participated in a fair number of these battles of knowledge and wit. The very fact that some measure of truth can be achieved through a sort of cognitive purgatory is both encouraging and, it seems, to

Comments

[chescot]

Thinking is also a great aid in tiring yourself to sleep at night. I started from countin to 10 in Japanese, ON readings. Presently, it stops being enough. Now it's days of month. I'll have to switch to thinking kanji soon though. Counting tends to get less and less tiresome. Sharpening.

[jarofthoughts]

Just the fact that you have managed to learn Japanese goes to show that you have either more linguistic prowess than me, or more stamina.
I gave up after a year. ^_^

[chescot]

Ha! I gave up after a year and a half. But then again, that was because of our baby girl without no grandmothers in close vicinity. So I just keep blowing into the fire, I didn't intend to quit whatsoever. >.>

[jarofthoughts]

Kids tend to do things like that. ;)

Thinking with Hume

[anonymous]

Nice post. I've recently been reading Hume ('Enquiry concerning human understanding'). He talks about the fact that much of our thinking about the world involves trying to figure out what causes what. Unlike the A>B, B>C so A>C type of thinking which is solidly grounded logically(as you mentioned), thinking about what causes what in the world around us is kind of odd. All we ever see is A followed by B. We never actually see that A causes B (no matter how many times A is followed by B). Instead it's something our brains add to our observations. Hume is such a pleasure to read because he's so clear in his thinking. (I'm a bit off the point of your post now - but your discussion of learning how-to-think brought Hume to mind). :)

Re: Thinking with Hume

[jarofthoughts]

Thanks. :)

Hume is indeed right, and to counter our inability to separate correlation and causation, the best tool we have invented so far is the Scientific Method, unquestionably the most powerful and useful idea we humans have ever come up with.

The main point I was trying to address was that most people are terribly poor at critically judging arguments, both their own and the ones fronted by others, by their logical and factual content, something which stiffles proper argumentation and inhibits what I see as the main point of discussion; getting closer to the truth.