HOW WE THINK

-John Dewey-

Dewey argues that thinking is a natural automated act, just like breathing and heartbeat are,
and therefore it is impossible to teach someone to think. However, it is possible to help develop
someone’s thinking, by helping develop a creative, curious and questioning mind. To do so we do
not need to teach information in schools, rather encourage stimulus in the form of challenging the
external reality. Instead of teaching data in schools, we can create encouraging environment,
within which the already-creative-mind will be stimulated into further creative thinking. Dewey
also argues that the act of thinking equals the act of believing; that in effect when we ‘think’
something we actually ‘believe’ it – thinking is believing. There must be resources that are already
active in the mind, since we cannot force a brain to think out of nothing. We cannot teach one to
think. Thinking is natural. There is a natural resource that ‘activates’ the mind. Every living
creature is in constant interaction with its surroundings and is in a process of give and take. Wonder
is the author of science and philosophy. External monotony and internal routines are the enemies
of wonder. The surprising and unexpected stimulate wonder.

In his article how we think, he stated that there are five phases or aspects of reflective
thought. That in between, as states of thinking are,

1. Suggestions in which the mind leaps forwards to a possible solution.

2. Intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity has been felt into a problem to be
solved, a question for which an answer must be sought;
3. The use of one suggestion or another as a leading idea or hypothesis to guide the
observation and other operations in the collection of factual materials;
4. Mental elaboration of the idea or supposition9 reasoning in the sense in which
reasoning is a part, not the whole inference)
5. Testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action.
 How we think is like comparing the scientific process of arriving into the result but through
a step by step process called the scientific method and John Dewey’s article about how a human
think it and this article is implying that as humans we tend to be bias on the results of our
investigation for we reach a certain conclusion through imaginative action. Dewey discusses that
thinking is believing. If this is the case why would he even bother try to persuade us that it is
scientific reasoning? Where is scientific reasoning in an imaginative action? John Dewey is
opinionated, he only believes what he likes to believe, yes, he also has a hypothesis but his
hypothesis is tested only in her imagination and not in an actual experimentation. His results only
depend on what he had observed and then imagine the result of that action. It is like formulating a
cause and effect situation. His article could pass as a literary piece in English wherein imagination
is important. He could be a writer of fictional stories. This article of Dewey had shattered my high
regards of him as a scientist that is progressivists. He is contradicting some of his own works.
Being progressivists must mean that you are open to new ideas. He must realize that science is a
body of knowledge that is base on facts not on one’s imagination.