A Study of Thinking is a pioneering account of how human beings
achieve a measure of rationality in spite of the constraints
imposed by bias, limited attention and memory, and the risks of
error imposed by pressures of time and ignorance. First published
in 1956 and hailed at its appearance as a groundbreaking study, it
is still read three decades later as a major contribution to our
understanding of the mind. In their insightful new introduction,
the authors relate the book to the cognitive revolution and its
handmaiden, artificial intelligence.
The central theme of the work is that the scientific study of
human thinking must concentrate upon meaning and its achievement
rather than upon the behaviorists' stimuli and responses and the
presumed connections between them. The book's point of departure is
how human beings group the world of particulars into ordered
classes and categories--concepts--in order to impose a coherent and
manageable order upon that world. But rather than relying
principally on philosophical speculation to make its point, A Study
of Thinking reports dozens of experiments to elucidate the
strategies that people use in penetrating to the deep structure of
the information they encounter.
This seminal study was a major event in the cognitive revolution
of the 1950s. Reviewing it at the time, J. Robert Oppenheimer said
it "has in many ways the flavor of conviction which makes it point
to the future."
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