How It Feels to Think: Experiencing Intellectual Invention

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8 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

This article explores some aspects of what happens, and what can happen, in the complex practice we commonly refer to as “thinking.” Of all the practices involved in the messy processes we call research, “thinking” is perhaps the most pervasive and widespread. Yet, it also remains the most opaque. Thinking happens, but it is seldom spoken about. The theories we normally engage with never say how they come about. Surely, philosophers of various traditions have dedicated countless pages to the question of what thought is, and some social scientists have recently attempted to theorize “methods” of theorizing in research. Such accounts, however, tend to remain at odds with the hesitant, playful, and profoundly eventful experience of thinking-feeling in and through research. The experience, that is, that thoughts often think other thoughts, that they happen to us, and that thinking therefore involves an art of learning to confer on ideas the capacity to make us think. In this article, I seek not to make grand claims about the nature of thought, but to make perceptible the dramatic and perplexing experience that thinking can constitute. In so doing, I draw on the work of philosopher of heuristics, Judith Schlanger, whose central aim has been to come to terms with the adventure of what she terms “intellectual invention.” The task is to open up a different—if never fully transparent—conversation about how it feels to think.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)609-616
Number of pages8
JournalQualitative Inquiry
Volume24
Issue number9
Early online date5 Oct 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2018

Keywords

  • heuristics
  • intellectual invention
  • Judith Schlanger
  • pragmatism
  • sociology of ideas
  • William James

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Anthropology
  • Social Sciences (miscellaneous)

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