How We Think

A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective

Thinking to the Educative Process

John Dewey (1933)

Rosan Chow
Design Colloquium, 20.10.2010

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What is Reflective Thinking?
•Daydreaming: no careful examination of evidence.
•Thinking is usually restricted to things not directly perceived,
(requires inference). Thinking is practically synonymous with
believing. Prejudice: adopted without own reaching the
conclusion.
•Reflective thinking aims at a conclusion: 'An end in view'.
•Reflective thinking is an orderly chain of ideas.
•Reflective thinking impels to inquiry.
'Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or
supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that
support it and the further conclusions to which it tends constitutes
reflective thought.'

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Examples of Reflective Thinking

•A case of practical deliberation. (Problem & solution within

everyday experience)
•A case of reflection upon an observation. (Situated within
everyday experience, problem & solution appeals somewhat
to a theoretic interest).
•A case of reflection involve experiment. (Problem & solution
occur to one with some prior scientific training)
'These three cases have been purposely selected so as to form a
series from the more rudimentary to more complicated cases of
reflection.' (From everyday experience to scientific training.)

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Inference to the Unknown

• No thought without inference.

• Inference involves a leap. Inference is 'through suggestion
that is aroused by what is seen and remembered. Now, while
the suggestion pops to the mind, just what suggestion occurs
depends first upon the experience of the person. This in turn is
dependent upon the general state of culture of the time.‘
• Proving is testing.
• Two kinds of testing. 'Suggested inferences are tested in
thought to see whether different elements in the suggestion
are coherent with one another. They are also tested, after one
has been adopted, by action to see whether the consequences
that are anticipated in thought occur in fact….'The two
methods do not differ, however, in kind. Testing in thought for
consistency involves acting in imagination.

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Thinking Moves from a Doubtful to a Settled Situation

•It arises from a directly experienced situation

•It moves toward a settled situation.
‚The function of reflective thought is, therefore, to transform
a situation in which there is experienced obscurity, doubt,
conflict, disturbance of some sort, into a situation that is
clear, coherent, settled, harmonious.‘

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Facts & Ideas

• Reflection includes observation of facts by direct sense or

by memory.
• Reflection includes suggestions (ideas) that lead to new
observation.
• Data (observed facts) and ideas are correlative and
indispensable factors in reflection. <Crossing a ditch>

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Five Phases, or Aspects, of Reflective Thought

• 1 Suggestion comes to you. (A vicarious, anticipatory way of

acting).
• 2 Intellectualization of a situation to a more defined problem. 'But in
every case where reflective activity ensues, there is a process of
intellectualizing what at first is merely an emotional quality of the
whole situation. This conversion is effected by noting more definitely
the conditions that constitute the trouble and cause the stoppage of
action.'
• 3 Hypothesis: A suggestion becomes a more definite supposition
that is testable and perhaps measurable.
• 4 Reasoning (in the narrow sense): ideas lead to other ideas.
(Depends upon prior knowledge of the individual and of the cultural
at large).
• 5 Testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action to give
verification.
• The sequence of the five phases is not fixed. (Social Studies of
Sciences).
• One phase may be expanded. Reference to the future and the past.