Chapter 2: On the Nature of Thinking and Its Composition

Abstract

A psychological study of thinking, of course, depends on the overall psychological theory that is applied. The basic postulate of the psychological theory from which we proceed may be formulated as follows: the primary mode of the existence of the psyche is its existence as a process or activity. Based on this premise, the main subject matter of the psychological study of thinking is thinking as a process, as an activity. This principle is aimed against the conscious or unconscious behaviorist, pragmatic, positivist tendencies that have proliferated lately in psychology and that are manifested in the reduction of a psychological study to a “pure description” of the external course of events without uncovering the internal course of the process that underlies these external facts and leads to them. We strive everywhere to proceed from objectively controlled “external” facts, but we regard the task of a psychological study as also shedding light on the internal conditions and patterns of the hidden process that does not appear in a straightforward way and that leads to them. When we refer to the necessity of shedding light behind the external results on the process that leads to them, we mean the necessity of shedding light on the internal conditions of what takes place in the external course of events and properly correlating external and internal conditions; in other words, we are not talking about some process in general but about a certain understanding of it that is in keeping with the principle of determinism. Therefore, the two fundamental postulates that define our approach to the problem of thinking—the dialectical-materialist principle of determinism and the proposition regarding the process of thinking as the basic subject matter of the psychological study—essentially form a single unit. Every thought process has its own resultant expression in a certain formation (e.g., perception as a process in the perception of an object as an image; or thinking as process in a certain concept). Since any such formation is the result or “product” of the relevant process, it is then