world literature

How to Think

Robert Lunday

This lecture is on something you’ve been doing your whole life – thinking. You already know how, but I want to draw your attention to certain styles of thinking that contribute to good writing. Mainly, I will focus on creative and critical patterns (or paradigms, or heuristics) of thinking. To a large extent, this is a vocabulary lesson: what we call certain patterns or features of thought, and how these terms relate within various structures. I will be terribly brief, because I want to cover the field comprehensively – so, don’t expect to know everything about each category after reading this. Think of it as a starting point. I will try to provide brief illustrations, but for the most part, for brevity’s sake, I will stay abstract. You might try giving examples of some concepts in your response to the lecture.

Mainly, I think of these processes as either “critical” or “creative” – although they overlap a great deal. “Critical” comes from the Greek – “being able to make judgments.” So, criticizing is judging, or discerning, or seeing relations – perhaps according to criteria, laws, or guidelines, according to the field of criticism. “Creative” is easier: making something. But we often contrast the words by expecting “Critical” thinking to be more rule-bound, more formal, more objective, more serious; creativity is more subjective, personal, even “flaky,” in some people’s minds. But one can’t do without the other, really.

Since we’re looking at Thinking as writers, let me digress for a moment and present you with the traditional Five Canons of Rhetoric: Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and

Delivery. This lecture relates somewhat to all five, but especially to Invention (where we get our ideas and content from), Arrangement (how we deploy those ideas – order), and Memory (not just memorizing, but making our material memorable; and, drawing upon individual and communal memory in Invention). So, patterns of thought will contribute to a study of Invention, Arrangement, and Memory, in particular.

When we analyze, we break one thing down into its component parts. Breaking down without destroying is trying to find where the parts naturally or logically separate; we

need criteria or standards of analysis, in other words. That will depend on our purposes, somewhat. What are we trying to find out? I have asked you to write about “pleasure” in your first essay; if your central goal is to talk about human emotional experience, perhaps from a moral viewpoint, you might break down you material according to acceptable versus unacceptable forms of pleasure; this might suggest clear, polar divisions (opposites), or it might be a matter of degree: a range of experiences according to the principle of moral acceptability. These are some possible criteria. Also, analysis can be thought of as the other side of synthesis, or putting things together. Mainly, this term refers to thinking that seeks analogous relationships among different aspects of things; some people are good at seeing connections between things

that other people don’t notice. Or, when you are trying to unify different points of view, different materials, and so on, synthesis is necessary toward a workable whole. It is useful to work both directions on a problem: take it apart, then put it together with other things.

2

Point of view or perspective affects how we see things when we need to analyze them. You will need to think about audience as well as your own persona or ethos: who are you writing to, and as what kind of person? Ethos is a term for the author’s projected good will – the image of yourself as someone with authority on your subject, but also as someone concerned essentially with the good as your audience would understand it. But also, think of point of view as a matter of closeness to your topic, or of depth – which might depend on how long your essay will be, or what your audience might already be expected to know about your subject. So, your analysis

might have to divide “parts” of the topic very finely, or not. Also, of course, point of view is subjectivity or bias: none of us is omniscient. We all have blind spots, ideologies, agendas, fears, hatreds, etc. All we can do is be aware of them, and seek to minimize their effect on our attempts to communicate with our audience.

Let me digress again somewhat, but with what I think is a useful characterization of my own thinking processes. I like to apply physical or spatial metaphors to the problem of thought. So, for example, I think of my topic as a landscape (in fact, “topography” and “topic”

are etymologically related – thought was considered as coming from “places” in, or accessible to, the mind). For some points, I might need to be as if on my hands and knees, like a chemist, entomologist, or botanist, studying the soil, the insects, seeds, etc. Or, I might need to be like someone high above in a helicopter, surveying the whole landscape within a broader horizon of relations. Perspective can be at varying degrees of distance to the topic, depending on your audience and your purposes – and your basic parameters, as I said: how long your essay will be. As we will see when we get to Rhetorical Analysis (studying texts), this “altitude” metaphor is especially useful: sometimes, we need to explicate – that is, unfold details of a text at the sentence, phrase, or word level. At other points, we need to step back (or rise above, figuratively speaking) and see the lay of the land – the paragraphs, paragraph blocks, main sections, whole essay, and even beyond: the writer’s body of work, the range of writings on a certain topic, in a certain field, or in a certain period of time (we’ve just gone high enough to see the treetops, then the mountain tops, then the continents, then the whole globe from out in space, if we insist on my “altitude” metaphor).

As I go along, I will suggest other material metaphors, or analogues: concrete, familiar frames of thought by which to imagine these rather abstract concepts. The “altitude” metaphor suggests a variety of provisional characteristics: proximity, aperture, angle, etc. I also often imagine things by a “cinema” analogue that is closely related: where would the camera be in a descriptive or narrative passage? How many scenes or shots would there be? What would the mise en

scène (the outer frame) be? Do whatever makes your material comfortable or manageable or familiar to you, and hopefully, to your reader.

Now, let me talk about general reasoning processes. “Reason” means many things: generally, it is opposed to intuition or emotion; it is supposed to be dispassionate, moderate, balanced, and sane; the goal of reason is always supposed to be the Truth with a capital “T.” Traditionally, Reason as a human faculty was contrasted with Faith: Reason, a gift of God, took us far in the world, but at some point, Faith had to take over. But in the modern age, that has often been neglected: Reason alone might seem to be the source of Science and its bounties, but many scientists themselves would give credit to Faith and Intuition – and luck.

More formally, Reasoning is about three main patterns of thought: deduction, or thought extending from generalities toward specifics; induction, or thought extending from specifics toward the general; and “abduction,” or what is more commonly called inference. Baconian Scientific Method (Sir Francis Bacon) is essentially inductive: you observe particular phenomena, seeking to discover a general principle that links what you observe in the system under observation. But really, we go back and forth from deduction to induction: we apply general assumptions to what we see, and what we see affects how we interpret, understand, or

accept received generalities. Inference is the skill of seeing how A and B add up to C, when C is not directly given in what we are viewing.

Next, the foundation of Reason: logic. Logic can be thought of as the underlying structure of reasoning, or the laws of reasoning (although we usually don’t think very directly about logical relations and corollaries). Formal, propositional logic is a method for making the hidden structures overt, or open. The logician is concerned with formulating or identifying statements or propositions – that something is or isn’t so – and then testing the truth value of those statements. I won’t go into great detail about this area, but I recommend looking at “Introduction to logic” web sites for a little practice. It’s essentially mathematics, but a little practice with logic

problems is good training for the mind. Also, let me mention “logical fallacies.” I’ll say more about them in a later lecture, but you might look at some of the Argument links on our Links page for examples (also, the handbooks usually discuss them). These are the various ways our reasoning can go wrong. For example, if you note that it rains seemingly every time you forget your umbrella, and conclude that leaving your umbrella at home causes the rain, then you’ve committed the “propter hoc” fallacy (many of them are given Latin names). Just because one event follows another doesn’t mean it is necessarily caused by the preceding event. On the other hand, fallacies aren’t always incorrect in specific situations; they are,

however, generally unsound as patterns of reasoning. See “Love is a Fallacy” by Max Shulman for some entertaining examples of fallacies.

Now let me leap into “creative” thinking – not that analysis, reasoning, and logic don’t depend on creativity; but there are other ways to understand the way the mind works, and thereby to enhance our ability to think “well.” Creative thought depends very much

on association, resemblance, or even what we could call the natural “sympathy” of things – that everything is a part of everything else, or connected in some way, or similarly patterned. Also, creativity depends on the thinker having an interest in things-in-themselves, along with having (perhaps) a practical goal. It might also involve various “parts” of the mind at different times. To use another analogy, I often approach problems by focusing consciously on the issue, or by putting it on the “front burner”; but since things seem to resist analysis or exploration, I know that I will need to turn away from the problem – I will need to put it on the “back burner.”

My dream life, my unconscious, or my emotional self will then work on the problem; my best ideas come when I’m walking, I think because my whole body is involved in thinking; and perhaps because I am walking outside, when there is more sensory input. Or, they come when I’m in the shower – first, because my mind is a trickster, and knows I can’t easily get out and

write the ideas down; and, again, because of the physicality of thought: the hot water hitting my skin changes the way blood (and ideas) flow through me.

You’ve heard, no doubt, the expression “thinking outside the box”; it’s become a cliché, and therefore has lost some of its effectiveness. The underlying principles might be: first, to be broad-minded; second, to “move” a bit – exchange center with periphery (which is another way of imagining the “front burner/backburner” metaphor). Also, it is a kind of courage: to be

unafraid of disorder or failure. Brainstorming is the creation of an environment in which we can “pretend” to that risk: “dumb” ideas are allowed expression as well as good one, because the good ideas are often just underneath the silly ones.

Visualization is important to creative thinking. I have said that I try to work with physical, visual, or spatial metaphors or structures. Among the more important structures for me

are scales (seeing things on a vertical ladder, with some sort of value system determining how high or low the item is); continua (“continuum” in the singular), which are scales turned sideways: to my mind, this removes the implication that one side is “better” than the other, when that is important. Or, we need to see things as absolute binaries or polarities (black/white, good/bad). Finally, we often need to fit items into taxonomies, “trees,” or flowcharts: how do items fit together in expanding plural relationships, as in an organizational structure, a family genealogical tree, or a “family” of life forms (such as mammals)?

One important scale is between the extremes of specificity and generality. Let’s look at “pleasure.” Where does that word fit on such a scale? It’s not too specific, but we could reach to a higher level or generality – “pleasure” is one mode of “feeling.” Asking what causes or forms of pleasure there are is to go down toward the more specific. And, as you can see, the more specific we get, the more varied or numerous our concepts become – thus, a flowchart, a

taxonomy, or “family tree” tree works better at some point in our invention.

Lastly, I want to look at Memory. Invention often is a matter of looking into memory for

feelings, thoughts, or information you already possess. The “Socratic Method” is founded on

the belief that students can be brought to “remember” things that are a priori, or “already there” in the mind. Memory is highly associational (like the imagination); one way to recall things is to create vivid, unusual, or emotional connections between one thing and another. Also, memory works better when we tie it to visual and spatial contexts; the ancient art of memory trained orators and lawyers to associate items with rooms in an imaginary building; when recalling, they would walk through the rooms in their mind, finding the parts of their speech in each “room.” We tend these days to think of memory as “short-term” or “long-term.” As writers, it is useful to invent or find our raw material by exercising long-term memory, and to find the right arrangements for our essays by creating memorable (and often simple) climactic patterns that

allow us to “see” where we are going, and hold more fully in mind the entire discourse.

We can also distinguish between individual and group patterns of thought. Mainly, we think of thinking as something we do on our own; but if I can approach the word more broadly, “group” thinking (which generally sounds negative: “group think” is conformity) is, in my view, (1) the influence of tradition, precedent, heritage, or received wisdom; and (2) the processes of dialogue, debate, and dialectic as they affect our thinking at the individual level. When people seek consensus, they work at the group level, and in a sense sacrifice individual perspective to that of the group (something not so easy to do in our culture). Dialectic is an important, and very old, pattern of group thinking, that connects back to our patterns of individual thought: one

person makes a statement, a thesis; the other counters it (perhaps as “devil’s advocate” – deliberately contrary, even if they think otherwise) with an antithesis; the first person might revise his or her thesis in response, toward a synthesis. This point, then, can become the thesis for a new generation of ideas. Dialectic was traditionally nearly synonymous with “thinking,” because it was important (for example, in the creation of Church theology) to have agreement, but to look into one’s conscience as well.

This has been a very brief, but vocabulary-laden, lecture – short on illustrations, long on abstractions, I know. I recommend looking up many of these words (some are on our list already) to find web sites that exemplify the concepts. Or, as you continue writing, practice some of these patterns.

Below is a list of verbs, nouns, and adjectives that relate to thinking (“listing” is another thinking pattern, the raw form of thinking in terms of scales or taxonomies). See if you can think of any others, and look up some words that you might not know already. Try fitting these on scales, in taxonomies, etc.

Analyze	Induce	Remember	Astute
Anticipate	Infer	Ruminate	Bright
Apprehend	Inform	Scrutinize	Brilliant
Associate	Inquire	Suppose	Canny
Believe	Intuit	Speculate	Clever
Brainstorm	Invent	Study	Crafty
Cogitate	Investigate	Synthesize	Keen
Comprehend	Have an Insight	Theorize	Quick
Conceive	Introspect	Think	Sharp
Consider	Judge	Understand	Shrewd
Contemplate	Know	Competence	Slick
Create	Learn	Consciousness	Sly
Deduce	Meditate	Ingenuity	Smart
Deliberate	Mull	Intelligence	Experience
Derive	Muse	Genius	Memory
Discover	Have a Notion	Perspicacity	Intuition
Discriminate	Plan	Savvy	Instinct
Distinguish	Ponder	Skill	Opinion
Dream	Prophecy	Talent	Belief
Dwell	Question	Thought	Observation
Fantasize	Realize	“Vision”	Information
Guess	Reason	Wit	Fact
Hypothesize	Recall	Acute	Dreaming
Have an Idea	Reckon	Adept	Reading
Imagine	Reflect	Alert	Searching