thought

Elements of thought

The prominent use of words in thinking (“silent speech”) encouraged the belief, especially among behaviourist and neobehaviourist psychologists, that to think is to string together linguistic elements subvocally. Early experiments revealed that thinking is commonly accompanied by electrical activity in the muscles of the thinker’s organs of articulation (e.g., in the throat). Through later work with electromyographic equipment, it became apparent that the muscular phenomena are not the actual vehicles of thinking; they merely facilitate the appropriate activities in the brain when an intellectual task is particularly exacting. The identification of thinking with speech was assailed by the Russian psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky and by the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, both of whom observed the origins of human reasoning in children’s general ability to assemble nonverbal acts into effective and flexible combinations. These theorists insisted that thinking and speaking arise independently, although they acknowledged the profound interdependence of these functions.

Following different approaches, three scholars—the 19th-century Russian physiologist Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov; the American founder of behaviourism, John B. Watson; and Piaget—independently arrived at the conclusion that the activities that serve as elements of thinking are internalized or “fractional” versions of motor responses. In other words, the elements are considered to be attenuated or curtailed variants of neuromuscular processes that, if they were not subjected to partial inhibition, would give rise to visible bodily movements.

Get Unlimited Access

Try Britannica Premium for free and discover more.

Subscribe

Sensitive instruments can indeed detect faint activity in various parts of the body other than the organs of speech—e.g., in a person’s limbs when movement is thought of or imagined without actually taking place. Recent studies show the existence of a gastric “brain,” a set of neural networks in the stomach. Such findings have prompted theories to the effect that people think with the whole body and not only with the brain, or that, in the words of the American psychologist B.F. Skinner, “thought is simply behaviour—verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt.”

The logical outcome of these and similar statements was the peripheralist view. Evident in the work of Watson and the American psychologist Clark L. Hull, it held that thinking depends on events in the musculature: these events, known as proprioceptive impulses (i.e., impulses arising in response to physical position, posture, equilibrium, or internal condition), influence subsequent events in the central nervous system, which ultimately interact with external stimuli in guiding further action. There is, however, evidence that thinking is not prevented by administering drugs that suppress all muscular activity. Furthermore, it has been pointed out by researchers such as the American psychologist Karl S. Lashley that thinking, like other more-or-less skilled activities, often proceeds so quickly that there is not enough time for impulses to be transmitted from the central nervous system to a peripheral organ and back again between consecutive steps. So the centralist view—that thinking consists of events confined to the brain (though often accompanied by widespread activity in the rest of the body)—gained ground later in the 20th century. Nevertheless, each of these neural events can be regarded both as a response (to an external stimulus or to an earlier neurally mediated thought or combination of thoughts) and as a stimulus (evoking a subsequent thought or a motor response).

The elements of thinking are classifiable as “symbols” in accordance with the conception of the sign process (“semiotics”) that grew out of the work of philosophers (e.g., Charles Sanders Peirce), linguists (e.g., C.K. Ogden and Ivor A. Richards), and psychologists specializing in learning (e.g., Hull, Neal E. Miller, O. Hobart Mowrer, and Charles E. Osgood). The gist of this conception is that a stimulus event x can be regarded as a sign representing (or “standing for”) another event y if x evokes some, but not all, of the behaviour (both external and internal) that would have been evoked by y if it had been present. When a stimulus that qualifies as a sign results from the behaviour of an organism for which it acts as a sign, it is called a “symbol.” The “stimulus-producing responses” that are said to make up thought processes (as when one thinks of something to eat) are prime examples.

This treatment, favoured by psychologists of the stimulus-response (S-R) or neo-associationist current, contrasts with that of the various cognitivist or neorationalist theories. Rather than regarding the components of thinking as derivatives of verbal or nonverbal motor acts (and thus subject to laws of learning and performance that apply to learned behaviour in general), cognitivists see the components of thinking as unique central processes, governed by principles that are peculiar to them. These theorists attach overriding importance to the so-called structures in which “cognitive” elements are organized, and they tend to see inferences, applications of rules, representations of external reality, and other ingredients of thinking at work in even the simplest forms of learned behaviour.

The school of Gestalt psychology holds the constituents of thinking to be of essentially the same nature as the perceptual patterns that the nervous system constructs out of sensory excitations. After the mid-20th century, analogies with computer operations acquired great currency; in consequence, thinking came to be described in terms of storage, retrieval, and transmission of items of information. The information in question was held to be freely translatable from one “coding” to another without impairing its functions. What came to matter most was how events were combined and what other combinations might have occurred instead.