Some people think better than others?
Quoting T Clark
Better according to what standard? Better according to what criteria?
Who sets the standard? Who picks the criteria?
To state categorically that some people think better than others makes no sense.
To state that some people are better able to realize their own goals/objectives with certain tools than others are makes sense. Some people are more effective with written language than others. Some people are more effective orators than others. Some people are more effective with math than others. Some people are able to more effectively use their motor skills than others. Some people are more effective with hand tools than others. Etc. Etc.
It depends on one's personal goals/objectives.
Or is there some universal, absolute goal/objective that humans' mental faculties exist to work towards and some of us have missed it? What is that goal/objective? A theory of everything? The meaning of life? The complete set of facts in the universe? Truth? What truth?
It strikes me as individually narcissistic and collectively ethnocentric to talk like one way of functioning mentally is the way all are supposed to function mentally, and to evaluate and rank everybody according to that way.
And just like there are different writing styles, communication styles, etc., there are different thinking styles.
Furthermore, even if one person is so blessed that he/she can excel at every style, when other people use the smaller number of styles that they excel at it does not mean that they are not good.
Or am I wrong and either you are Shakespeare or you are not good at writing?
Finally, how can you say that anybody is not good at thinking unless you know exactly what he/she is trying to accomplish? How do you know that the problem is not communication rather than reasoning ability? How do you know that you would be better able to work on the question/problem/puzzle someone else is working on? Sorry, but just because somebody else's thinking does not suit your's does not mean that you are a better thinker. Or are you able to read other people's minds?
Sorry, and this is not intended as a dig, this forum shows, if it wasn't obvious already, that some people do think better than others.
Better according to what standard? Better according to what criteria?
Who sets the standard? Who picks the criteria?
To state categorically that some people think better than others makes no sense.
To state that some people are better able to realize their own goals/objectives with certain tools than others are makes sense. Some people are more effective with written language than others. Some people are more effective orators than others. Some people are more effective with math than others. Some people are able to more effectively use their motor skills than others. Some people are more effective with hand tools than others. Etc. Etc.
It depends on one's personal goals/objectives.
Or is there some universal, absolute goal/objective that humans' mental faculties exist to work towards and some of us have missed it? What is that goal/objective? A theory of everything? The meaning of life? The complete set of facts in the universe? Truth? What truth?
It strikes me as individually narcissistic and collectively ethnocentric to talk like one way of functioning mentally is the way all are supposed to function mentally, and to evaluate and rank everybody according to that way.
And just like there are different writing styles, communication styles, etc., there are different thinking styles.
Furthermore, even if one person is so blessed that he/she can excel at every style, when other people use the smaller number of styles that they excel at it does not mean that they are not good.
Or am I wrong and either you are Shakespeare or you are not good at writing?
Finally, how can you say that anybody is not good at thinking unless you know exactly what he/she is trying to accomplish? How do you know that the problem is not communication rather than reasoning ability? How do you know that you would be better able to work on the question/problem/puzzle someone else is working on? Sorry, but just because somebody else's thinking does not suit your's does not mean that you are a better thinker. Or are you able to read other people's minds?
Comments (41)
Saying that some people think better than other people do is a truism. It's like saying "Good food is better than bad food."
I think it's obvious that some people think better than I do (they are just smarter than me, more insightful, logical, etc.) and it's obviously that I think better than some people too. Some people are better looking, have bigger dicks, make better pie crust, are stronger, healthier, etc. than other people.
WISDOMfromPO-MO, are you aware -- if not, allow me -- that 50% of the population is below average?
Who cares about a dick when someone else has got a bigger IQ?
It makes sense to say it because thinking is a general skill. To say someone thinks better is to make a general statement, which is appropriate when we're talking about a general skill. It's true that thinking combines different styles and motivations, and some may be better at logical development than intuitive or imaginative leaps, but to say someone is a better thinker in general is probably most often just to say that they are better at all of those things, and that their thinking skills can be applied widely.
To state in my own words what has already been stated by others:
Cogitation (thinking) is controlled problem-solving, decision-making, and planning using active learning, explicit memory and declarative knowledge. As such, it depends on intelligence ( a measure of awareness, learning, and problem-solving proficiency; and knowledge, memory, and processing capacity).
Intuition is its automatic/passive/implicit/tacit counterpart.
The relationship between cogitation and intelligence is analogous to that of a skill developed from natural ability.
It does not make any sense to state categorically that some people think better than others, let alone to state categorically that it is obvious that some people think better than others.
Yes, some people can perform specific tasks, such as solving for checkmate, better than others.
But unless there is some universally agreed upon goal/objective for human mental functioning and some universally agreed upon threshold for good within that functioning--and nobody has said what those are--it makes no sense to state categorically that some people think better than others.
Humans perform a variety of mental tasks for a variety of reasons. If a person is able to employ his/her mental faculties to realize his/her goals/objectives then he/she is a good thinker. Other people's goals/objectives are irrelevant.
I don't know the statistics concerning how some people's IQs compare to other's, but it doesn't matter. People realizing their goals/objectives is what matters.
Aw, shucks, jamalrob. Stop it. You're embarrassing me.
Quoting jamalrob
There is a lot of controversy around using IQ testing as a measure of intelligence, which could be interpreted as the general ability to think good. One part of the disagreement relates to the fact that the human mind is not monolithic. It is made up of a bunch of capacities, abilities, skills, talents, and intelligences. Those all combine together to form a unified whole. I guess it is a case of an emergent property.
Also, it is widely believed that IQ testing is not a fair measure because it is culturally biased.
I never have.
Quoting jamalrob
No.
It implies that there is some goal/objective that all human thinking is directed at and some threshold that must be met or passed to be considered good, better, best, etc. at such an endeavor.
Nobody is telling us what that goal/objective and threshold are.
Isn't this the same as asking if there are people that are more intelligent than others?
Wouldn't IQ measure this?
There doesn't have to be some 'universally agreed upon' because it is merely my assessment that some people think better than some other people. If we were going to claim that "Everyone living in the Western Hemisphere thanks better than everyone in Asia, or Africa, or Europe--there would be far more need for definitions and standards of mental functioning. Intelligence tests, for instance, are based o a set of definitions and standards for determining how intelligent someone is (in as much as it is possible for the best tests to do that).
But actually I am basing my personal judgement on something. I have thought about certain kinds of problems, and have made little headway towards a solution. Sometimes I talk to people who have thought about the same thing, and they have worked through it with ease and brilliance. Sometimes I am talking with people who are struggling with some problem, and to me it is obvious what a good solution would be (I'm not talking about personal matters here).
A good 'back of the envelope' test of whether people are thinking effectively is how well they solve complex every-day kinds of problems. If you look, you will see that success in solving problems looks different than failure to solve problems. Some people do it better than others.
Don’t understand your beef. There are better and worse tennis players, pianists, writers, artists, scientists - not everyone has the same degree of skill in thinking and writing, and understanding of philosophy.
Quoting T Clark
My very first undergraduate essay was for Psychology, on the topic of Intelligence Testing. I argued, (quite eloquently I thought) that intelligence was not something that could be tested. I got F, with a single comment - 'wrong department' (i.e. I had submitted a philosophy essay for a psychology assessment). It stung, but it was a fair assessment, and I learned from it.
So presumably you're comfortable with the idea that we can tell when someone is happy, sad, angry, even though we cannot 'read their minds'. We do not constantly premise these conclusions with "in my opinion..." we're quite satisfied that very few facts can be stated unequivocally, and we needn't acknowledge that in each utterance.
Since we're all human beings, and human objectives are really not that varied it stands to reason (once we've had a little bit of data) that we can make a pretty good guess as to the general nature of another person's objectives. Hence it's not an unreasonable conclusion that some appear better than others at solving the problem of how to achieve them.
We assume this level of knowledge about other people's intentions all the time, to communicate, to help out in society, to make other people happy, I really don't see why we suddenly need to abandon all our insight and replace it with a completely blank page when making judgements about people's thinking ability.
Apart from that truth, which you seem to think is obvious.
It does make sense. You're just measuring an overall score. Restaraunt A is overall better than B even though B has better fries.
Him and I will have deep discussions and he has often said - 'my wife won't entertain this type of discussion, she's a newer human...'
Quite funny.. I think my wife is a newer human as well haha
Asking 'who sets' the standard presupposes that all standards are set by an agent/us. I would say that some standards are discovered as compared/contrasted to invented.
But they do not know how to start a computer.
Two humans. One quickly finds the answer to a problem (such as a maths one) whose solution is irrefutable; the other never finds the solution.
QED Some people think better than others.
The same pair of people being quizzed on a matter of emotional intelligence the result might find the maths failure can find the solution whilst the maths whizz fails even to understand the emotional problem.
QED Some people think better than others.
The point is clearly made.
NP
Personally, I'm open to forum competition. Anyone interested in nominating themselves as Bestest Thinker?
Finally, just because someone has studied philosophy, that doesn't mean they can form good arguments either, it takes a lot of practice, it's a skill. So thinking well in philosophy requires the ability to analyze and form good arguments, this, it seems to me, is the backbone of philosophy.
Thinking well is an interesting objective criteria. What we have here is a competition similar to figure skating or synchronized swimming. Can I be a judge? Or do we need judges to pick judges?
In general, humans continue to amaze me in their desire to have Kings of Hills. It's like it is the only way to bring meaning into a life. In Yoga it is who can twist themselves into the most contorted pretzel. It's interesting to observe.
Also, when I talk about objective criteria, I'm referring to the rules and principles of logic. So the criteria for well-formed arguments is not a matter of opinion, at least for the most part.
That would be a different the of competition, i.e. who had the greater Truth. Now it becomes more religious in nature and people compete for the King of the Truth Hill. Science, Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam? Who do you think had the greater Truth?
There are no objective rules for logic, only everyone's different versions which are debated on philosophy forums.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M14ReHfPFUw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1asxHpewYi8&t=230s
I just observe the discussions on the forum. Sometimes observation provides a better understanding of life than cookbook textbooks.
It was stated categorically that it is obvious that some people think better than others, and that this forum shows it.
That makes absolutely no sense.
We are talking about an abstraction, thinking, not about some specific, concrete event like someone swinging a golf club.
Here is an illustration: the statement "Thomas Kuhn is a better thinker than Noam Chomsky" makes no sense without any criteria. Based on what criteria? The number of books published? Pedigree--the number of later public intellectuals mentored/influenced? Nobel prizes? Solving a problem that had stumped intellectuals for 1,000 years versus one that had done so for only 200 years?
No two people can seem to agree on what demarcates science and non-science, yet it is obvious that some people are better scientists than others?
It does not matter if we are talking about tennis, the piano, writing, science or philosophy, it depends on the goals/objectives of the person/people carrying out the activity. Unless there are universally agreed upon goals/objectives for an activity, it makes no sense to state categorically that some people are better at that activity than others. It makes even less sense when we are talking about something abstract such as "thinking".
That just tells us that sharks and humans know different things, not that anybody thinks better than anybody else.
Quoting charleton
The statement was that some people think better, not that some people think faster.
Quoting charleton
How does any of that show that anybody is a "better thinker" than anybody else?
That sounds to me like saying philosophy is basically nothing more than the skills developed in a logic textbook or on a debate team.
I beg to differ. Philosophy is about finding wisdom. Logic and arguments are part of that journey, but to characterize philosophy as the craft of constructing arguments is focusing like a laser on one tree and being oblivious to the vast forest that it is part of.
You said that it is the "backbone of philosophy".
Knowledge can be gained without using any logic at all.
I do not have to know how to construct a valid deductive argument to gain knowledge. I do not have to have any familiarity with concepts like premise or conclusion to gain knowledge.
Looking at the clock on this computer that I am using I see that it is 11:55 p.m. eastern time. Knowledge gained. No arguments constructed or analyzed. No rules of logic needed.
Quoting Sam26
I thought that people construct arguments to support the truth of statements, not to justify what is going on in their minds (beliefs, thoughts, etc.).
Quoting Sam26
Hogwash.
Goals and objectives vary from person to person. For some people their goal might be enjoyment, and any truth or wisdom gained in the process is just a bonus.
You don't have to do it "well". You have to do it "well enough" to meet your goals/objectives.
Unless, of course, there is some universal standard of "well". Again, nobody in this thread is telling us what that universal standard is.
Quoting Sam26
And one can gain knowledge without formal logic.
Or are all of the people in the world who are never introduced to concepts like premise, conclusion, syllogism, informal fallacy, modus ponens, etc. doomed to lives with no knowledge and no wisdom?
So, you've already made your mind up, and you're going to dismiss any answer given which differs from your own? You appear to have already set the standard and picked the criteria. This discussion has the feeling of someone enticing others to grasp at something which has been placed out of reach by that very someone.
No one thinks any better than anyone else, [i]in your world[/I], because you won't allow it.
Now tell us what you think "better" is and I'll show you another example.