Chapter 2: On the Nature of Thinking and Its Composition

摘要

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.1 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, positi-vist 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.