Child's Mind (PDF)

6 What is thinking? (p. 98-99)

A chastening chapter title. It reminds me of an episode in bringing up my daughter that I would rather forget. It may have been the Milwaukee Maulers or the Chattanooga Cheetahs—I don’t recall exactly—but whichever team it was figured in an exercise on syllogisms in a logic text. I had got hold of it to hone my nine-year old-daughter’s thinking skills. How I cajoled her—and her mother—into working through examples like these and spotting invalidities I cannot now imagine. Quite likely I presented it as a new kind of family fun(!). At all events, it was hard going and I soon gave up syllogisms for logic puzzle books from our local newsagent.

I thought they would be closer to real life, but working out whether Andrew who is vegetarian, likes fishing and volleyball but not soccer or swimming, and is free only on Mondays and Thursdays is taller than Brian, who…proved to be, if anything, even less riveting. A philosopher should know better than to believe that the improvement of thinking in general is likely to come about through exercises in logic. These demand a highly specialised form of thinking. It is not focussed on clashes between competing commitments, on hitches in personal relationships, on how to fix a broken bicycle, on the flooded garden—or any of the other things we commonly think about. It is directed on to certain abstract relationships between statements.

While we may not want children to become formal logicians, we do want them to tackle practical problems in everyday life, think mathematically or historically, engage in creative writing, think how they should live a fulfilling or a morally good life. What do such things have in common which makes them all kinds of thinking?

Thinking as an activity

Let us get an obvious distinction out of the way.

• If a child is thinking, about some problem in algebra, say, she is engaging in a kind of activity. Something is presently

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