Both judging and reasoning depend on the possession of the relevant concepts, which are acquired in the process of concept formation. Reasoning, on the other hand, is the process of drawing conclusions from premises or evidence. A judgment is a mental operation in which a proposition is evoked and then either affirmed or denied. Various types of thinking are discussed in the academic literature. It sees thinking in analogy to how computers work in terms of the storage, transmission, and processing of information. Computationalism is the most recent of these theories. Behaviorists, by contrast, identify thinking with behavioral dispositions to engage in public intelligent behavior as a reaction to particular external stimuli. They are particularly interested in the laws of association that govern how the train of thought unfolds. Associationists understand thinking as the succession of ideas or images. Central to this idea is that linguistic representational systems are built up from atomic and compound representations and that this structure is also found in thought. The language of thought hypothesis, on the other hand, holds that this happens in the medium of a unique mental language called Mentalese. According to some accounts, this happens in a regular language, like English or French. Inner speech theories claim that thinking is a form of inner speech in which words are silently expressed in the thinker's mind. Conceptualism is closely related to Aristotelianism: it identifies thinking with mentally evoking concepts instead of instantiating essences. These universals are abstracted from sense experience and are not understood as existing in a changeless intelligible world, in contrast to Platonism. According to Aristotelianism, to think about something is to instantiate in one's mind the universal essence of the object of thought. It involves the ability to discriminate between the pure Platonic forms themselves and the mere imitations found in the sensory world. Platonists hold that thinking consists in discerning and inspecting Platonic forms and their interrelations.

They aim to capture the characteristic features of thought.

Various theories of thinking have been proposed. In a slightly different sense, the term thought refers not to the mental processes themselves but to mental states or systems of ideas brought about by these processes. But when understood in the widest sense, any mental event may be understood as a form of thinking, including perception and unconscious mental processes. These processes can happen internally independent of the sensory organs, unlike perception. But other mental processes, like considering an idea, memory, or imagination, are also often included. Their most paradigmatic forms are judging, reasoning, concept formation, problem solving, and deliberation. In their most common sense, the terms thought and thinking refer to conscious cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation. The Thinker by Rodin (1840–1917), in the garden of the Musée Rodin

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