Chapter 4: The Process of Analysis Through Synthesis and Its Role in Problem-Solving

The thinking process originates in a problematic situation. The characteristics of a problematic situation and the characteristics of the thinking process itself are inevitably interconnected and interdependent. A problematic situation, as we have seen, is a situation that contains (explicitly or implicitly) components or elements that are not defined in it and that presupposes something undiscovered in it. A problematic situation stirs up questions because its elements seem inadequate to the relationship in which they appear in the given situation (in the given context). The impetus to analyze the objects or phenomena that one’s thinking encounters arises when one discovers that, in the capacity in which they directly appear, they are not part of the connections with which one’s thinking deals. The thought process begins with the fact that the problematic situation itself is analyzed. As a result, the analysis separates the given, the known, and the unknown. This initiates the formulation of a problem, which we therefore distinguish from the problematic situation itself. The problem emerges in a certain formulation as a result of the analysis of the problematic situation. The problem’s formulation depends on how the analysis of the problematic situation was performed. The analysis of the data leads to the isolation of the conditions of the problem in the strict sense of the word and of its requirements. We take the conditions of the problem in the strict sense of the word to mean the data that underlie a solution and are incorporated as necessary premises into the line of reasoning that leads to a solution. Usually the problem contains a host of attendant circumstances that are not conditions of the problem in the aforementioned specific strict sense of the word. An example is a certain position of a figure in a drawing that is presented when a problem is formulated. An analysis that isolates the conditions of the problem in the aforementioned precise sense from the set of attendant