ACHIEVING KNOWLEDGE

Achieving knowledge (justified true beliefs) is the usual point of thinking. The tools of thinking, then, are the devices and processes we use in that enterprise:

* Experience provides the basic new input for our thinking: what we see, taste, smell, feel, hear, etc. It can be firsthand or secondhand.
* Memory provides a link to data previously collected by whatever means. Without memory, we would be perpetually at the starting point.
* Association functions with both immediate experience and with remembered experiences to group the data we have into clusters and sets.
* Pattern discernment and recognition enable us to make sense of what we remember and associate. Only when we begin to cluster information into some kind of pattern are we in a position to begin to use the next tool.
* Reason is where the hard work of thinking gets done. Reason takes many forms, such as deduction, generalization, extrapolation, and hypothesis construction.
* Invention is the point at which people of genius and creative imagination take over, proposing hypotheses, theories, models, and new ways of construing data that we can then put to work.
* Experimentation is the tool for keeping our thinking under the constraint of testing; of constantly looking to see whether what we have reasoned conforms to what we are experiencing.
* Intuition is a good thing when it happens, but it is rare and, by definition, uncharted.