Thinking operations: characteristic

"I think, therefore, I am." This famous expression, expressed by the French thinker of the XVI century, fully reflects the features of the course of human mental processes, aimed at solving various problems and revealing, revealing the essence of something. For this purpose, mental operations are used. In more detail, consider their essence and species.

Thinking operations are one of the ways of intellectual activity, by means of which a person will solve certain tasks. They are diverse: synthesis and analysis, abstraction, comparison, concretization, classification, generalization. Thinking operations depend on the tasks and nature of the data that are being processed. But the choice will also be determined by the individual characteristics of the person.

Basic mental operations

The analysis is an intellectual decomposition of unity into parts, or the separation of the main parties, relations and actions from it.

Synthesis is the reverse process. This is the union of properties, parts, relationships and actions in a whole.

But these thought processes are two interrelated logical operations. Analysis, like synthesis, can be both mental and practical. They were formed in the process of practical human activity, because people interact constantly with phenomena and objects. Therefore, due to their practical development, this led to the emergence of thought processes of synthesis and analysis.

Comparison implies the establishment of differences and similarities of phenomena and objects. Such mental operations are based on analysis. Since before the comparison process it will be necessary to distinguish a number of features on which it is carried out.

It may be incomplete, one-sided, multilateral or complete. Comparison is often done at different levels - superficial or deeper. In such cases , a person's thinking activity will come from signs of difference and similarity to internal characteristics, from the visible aspect to the hidden one, from the phenomenon itself to its essence.

Abstraction is a mental distraction from a number of sides and signs of the concrete in order to better understand it. In this case, a person begins to mentally distinguish some feature of any subject, treating it completely isolated from all other signs and distracting temporarily from them. Thanks to a separate study of specific features, provided that they are simultaneously distracted from the others, this will help a person to understand more deeply the essence of phenomena and things. Abstraction helps a person to break away from a concrete, individual and rise to the highest level of knowledge. It's about scientific and theoretical thinking.

The concretization is a process that is the opposite of abstraction and which is inextricably linked to it. This mental operation is the return of thought from the abstract and the general to the concrete in order to reveal the content.

One of the most necessary and important mental operations is generalization. The fact is that a person's thoughts will always be aimed at getting some result. The individual will always analyze the objects, comparing them and abstracting certain qualities and properties in order to reveal in them the general and to reveal the laws that govern their development. It is necessary to master them. Consequently, the generalization deals with the allocation in the phenomena and objects of the general, which is expressed in the form of a law, concepts, formulas, rules, and the like.

Therefore, thought operations must be developed from childhood.