Caring as Thinking

Matthew Lipman

In recent years, a number of authors have proposed sets of criteria with which to identify critical thinking.1 At the same time, there has been a concerted push to get educators to recognize the desirability of teaching for thinking and not just for knowledge. Since thinking is presumably something students do already, it has become desirable to insist that education be aimed at the production of "higher-order thinking."2 What, then, is the connection between critical thinking and higher-order thinking? Many writers have advocated that higher-order thinking be understood as a combination of critical and creative thinking. This is unobjectionable, but I would like to show here that there is such a thing as caring thinking, and that it is the third prerequisite to higher-order thinking.

1. Can Feelings Be Cognitive?

This is not a very auspicious beginning because it runs counter to our ordinary opinions concerning cognitive-affective relationships. According to these views, thinking is limited solely to the cognitive domain. The affective domain consists, instead, of psychological states that may precede, accompany or follow any of our thinking operations, but are definitely not to be confused with it. In other words, we are likely to think that our feelings are not instances of thinking, although they may be the causes or the effects of such instances. And caring is a kind of feeling.3

I suggest that, to begin, we put aside the case to be made for feeling as thinking, and inquire instead into the needs one might experience to categorize at least some feelings as cognitive. These needs become apparent when we contrast the cognitive operations generally associated with higher-order thinking (as in Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Vol. 1,4 which he lists as analysis, synthesis and evaluation) with lower-order operations such as memorization. This contrast can be made all the more dramatic if we begin to inventory the negatives of critical (e.g., uncritical, imprecise, inaccurate, irresponsible, slovenly, etc.) or the negatives of creative (e.g., uncreative, mechanical, unimaginative, inert, deadly, uninspired, routine, etc.). It would then seem that there is another cluster of negatives easily visible to the naked eye, negatives such as uncaring, diffident, unfeeling, callous, unappreciative, pitiless, insensitive, etc. What is the positive of which these are the negatives, and can it be categorized as cognitive?

It is obvious from what I have already said that caring would be at least an example of the positive version of these negatives. But this would in no way establish caring as cognitive—as a dimension of thinking. To that end, where should we begin?

One starting point that comes readily to mind is a well-known article by Israel Scheffler.5 Scheffler begins, promisingly enough, with a distinction between "emotions in the service of cognition" and "cognitive emotions." By "emotions in the service of cognition," Scheffler has three things in mind: (a) the so-called "rational passions," a concept developed earlier by R. S. Peters,6 (b) perceptual feelings, and (c) theoretical imagination. Rational passions Scheffler takes to be emotional dispositions that facilitate inquiry. Examples would be the love of truth, concern for accuracy, disgust at evasion and admiration for theoretical achievement. Scheffler also includes, under the heading of rational passions, those feelings and dispositions that can be organized into a "rational character," one that "works for a balance in thought, an epistemic justice, which requires its own special renunciations and develops a characteristic cognitive discipline."7 In the case of perception, Scheffler contends that the emotional ingredients of perceptions help us understand what we perceive, judge what we discern and interpret what we contemplate. As for the way in which our feelings play a role in theoretical cognition, Scheffler points to the verve and audacity of scientific speculation, the way our feelings help us distinguish and select among patterns and ideas of varying degrees of interest, and the enormous assistance they provide when it comes to applying the fruits of our imagination to the solution of problems.

Scheffler's insistence that this first group be labeled "emotions in the service of cognition" rather than "cognitive emotions" themselves is certainly open to question. His explanation—that they have nothing specifically cognitive about them, the cognitive element entering merely in the way they are organized—is unpersuasive, for they seem to do all that cognitions do. It also leaves unexplained how the organization of inert emotions can have such dynamic consequences.

What Scheffler chooses to call a distinctly cognitive emotion is highly specialized. It must rest upon a cognitive supposition and have a bearing upon the cognitive status of a person's cognitions (such as his or her beliefs or expectations). The examples he gives are the joy of verification and surprise. When what we discover conforms to or conflicts with our prior expectations, our feelings are cognitive because the reasons for them (our expectations) are themselves cognitive. It is difficult to see why rational passions such as the love of truth, concern for accuracy, disgust at evasion and admiration for theoretical achievement—in other words, emotions that facilitate inquiry but are classified by Scheffler as being merely "in the service of cognition"—do not equally well qualify as cognitive emotions. Surely the reasons for them are just as cognitive as the reasons for the joy of verification and surprise.

Disappointing as Scheffler's application of his principle—that an emotion is cognitive if the reason for it is cognitive—may be, the principle itself is worth keeping in mind. It provides us with a ground for distinguishing between cognitive and non-cognitive emotions. Thus, if one man answers the question, "Why do you abuse your children?" with the answer, "Because I love to," and another man answers the question, "Why did you marry your wife?" with the answer, "Because I loved her," it is likely that the first man will not be able to cite cognitive reasons for his "love" and that the second man will be able to do so. Loving the person one wants to marry is under most circumstances, appropriate and reasonable; loving to engage in child abuse is, under most circumstances, inappropriate and unreasonable. The cognitive nature of the reasons has to do with their appropriateness or inappropriateness, rather than with the expectations to which they do or do not conform.

It should be amply evident by now that words like "cognitive" and "thinking" are just as vague and polysignificant as words like "affective" and "feeling." Moreover, "cognitive" and "thinking" are often so closely aligned with language and symbolism that anything non-linguistic or nonsymbolic is promptly consigned to the realm of feeling rather than to that of thought. To offset this bias, I suggest that thinking be considered not so much a processing of information as a connecting or relating of bits of experience. In this sense, thinking is discovering, inventing, connecting, and experiencing relationships, and this is the case whether the relationships in question are symbolic relations or non-verbal rapports. We think when we perceive, for example, that parts of our visual field are connected with other parts, or when we become aware that the means we are using have an impact upon the consequences we end up with. The neural basis for thinking may well be a neural connecting, but the thinking itself is most certainly an experiential connecting.

With this understanding of thinking, we can be more specific as to what is meant by claiming that some types of feeling, such as caring, can be instances of thinking. But first let us consider a contention that is a stepping stone to our ultimate goal. This is the contention that emotions are judgments.

2. Emotions as Judgments

Many people who come across the notion that emotions can be classified as judgments are likely to associate that position with Robert Solomon,8 as well as, more recently, with Martha Nussbaum9 and Kathleen Wallace.10 Nevertheless, it is an ancient argument, going back at least to Chrysippus, and being associated generally with the Stoics.11 For Chrysippus, emotions are judgments in the (materialistic) sense that they register and respond to changes in the environment, somewhat in the sense that we today would personify a barometer's reaction to a drop in atmospheric pressure as an appraisal of its meteorological situation. Chrysippus tacks on two interesting qualifiers: as judgments, emotions are fresh ("recently formed" is his way of putting it) and false. Presumably, it is just because emotions are judgments that we are inclined to have confidence in them: if we mistrusted them more, they would have fewer opportunities to mislead us.

One might have thought that, for Chrysippus, the very fact of the freshness of emotions—that they were not stale or stereotyped—would be a guarantee of their truth rather than their falsity, but not so.12 The Stoic philosopher is likely to trust the rationality of a judgment as a much more reliable clue to its truth than its freshness or immediacy. But perhaps we are quibbling here over the distinction between pre-reflective (i.e., prima facie) and post-reflective judgments. Reason is likely to enter into the latter kind much more readily than into the former. Consider a drama critic who must review a play she had seen earlier that evening. While her recollections of her emotions are still fresh in her mind, she will likely review the occasions on which she laughed, smiled, groaned, winced, frowned or cried. These behaviors represent the immediate judgments that welled up in her as she responded to the drama. Her ultimate judgment will take these immediate judgments into account but need not conform to them (as in Leibniz, God's consequent will takes into account but need not conform to His antecedent will). The critic's final judgment will therefore represent a judgment of these freshly-minted assessments, these immediate evaluations that were authentic enough because they were made on the spot, but which lacked the sense of the whole which only a subsequent, global assessment could provide.

I have chosen an illustration in which an individual deliberates before deciding and decides before acting. But this is not the only way the Stoics can be understood. For Roman Stoics, says Lloyd (and remember that Chrysippus was a Greek), to interrupt with deliberation was normally "a sign of incompetence in the art of living.”13 How does one proceed to act without first engaging in deliberation? Lloyd asserts that:

"Making a judgment that Helen is lovable is the same act or event as having, meaning being aware of, a lovable mental representation of her. Choosing or deciding to love Helen is the same act as assenting to the judgment that she is lovable. Choosing or deciding to do something is usually the same or partially the same act or event as trying to do it."14

There is much here to bring to mind Aristotle’s practical syllogism, where one's knowledge of what one ought to do, together with one's knowledge that one is in a situation in which it is appropriate that one should do what one ought to do, results in one's promptly doing what had to be done.15

To get back to Chrysippus, he seems to be saying that, insofar as an opinion is true, it contributes to the smooth operation of the body, and causes none of those disturbing vibrations that register in the case of a false opinion. Emotions for him are incorrect judgments and incorrect judgments are the marks of an intemperate life. A temperate life is marked by correct judgments. This is why emotions are inappropriate to it.

Such is the usual interpretation, although there is the troubling fragment cited by Von Arnim (SVF III 461): "Chrysippus tries to demonstrate that emotions/affections are some kind of judgments of the rational.”16 Judgments of the rational! Does this mean that the emotions make their judgments of reason just as reason makes its judgments of the emotions? If this is so, is it why the Stoics take emotions to be judgments that are necessarily false? The fragment is tantalizing because it suggests two ways of thinking, each of which is wrong in terms of the other, and either of which could be an obstacle to the other. Or perhaps it simply represents two ways of thinking about thinking, one of which includes emotions as a component of thinking, and the other of which does not.

In recent years, Martha Nussbaum has focused her attention on the role of emotions in thinking as portrayed by a variety of traditional philosophers. She has identified two strong objections to the emotions, both of which have just been touched upon. The first is the view that the emotions are innate, unthinking processes that work to confuse and disrupt the mind's efforts at rationality, and she agrees that most philosophers now reject this simplistic account of the emotions as an obstacle to human thinking. On the other hand, she identifies a number of other thinkers, from the Greek and Roman Stoics to Descartes and Spinoza, who hold that the emotions are not unthinking but intelligent, not innate but learned, and not uncritical but judicious. Nevertheless, these philosophers also reject a positive role for the emotions in judgment because they see emotions as inherently unstable, or attached to unstable things, and therefore false. This position, Nussbaum holds, is far more profound than the first, and continues to attract many adherents. Nevertheless, it rests, she argues, on normative premises, such as the need for self-sufficiency and detachment, that are highly controversial in an age when the need for community seems to outweigh, by far, the need for individual independence. She says she finds the position profound because, "like all the most searching and incisive philosophical thought, it shows its own argumentative structure to its reader."17 But she insists that emotions (such as pity and fear) can be true and that "if emotion is not there, neither is that judgment fully there... It means that in order to represent certain sorts of truths, one must represent emotions. It also means that to communicate certain truths to one's reader, one will have to write so as to arouse the reader's emotions."18

3. The Traditional, Three-part Division

The Greeks subsumed the cognitive domain under three regulative ideals: the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. Aristotle transformed this into a more naturalistic trinity. For him, the divisions of inquiry consist of the theoretical sciences, the productive sciences and the practical sciences. Kant's major works deal with pure reason, practical reason and judgment.

The threefold distinction has more recently trickled down into curriculum theory, as in Bloom's taxonomy. Bloom and his associates have identified three aspects of higher-order thinking: the analytical, the synthetic and the evaluative.19 Meanwhile, in the metaphysics of Justus Buchler, judgings (as process) are divided into saying, making and doing, while judgments (as products) are divided into assertions, arrangements and actions.20

If we were to pursue the distinction between ordinary and higher-order thinking, we might well wish to retain this Trinitarian approach and specify such regulative ideals as truth, meaning and value. But then, what aspects of higher-order thinking could be said to approach these ideals? One might nominate critical thinking as the truth-seeking aspect and creative thinking as the meaning-seeking aspect. But what aspect of higher-order thinking is especially concerned with the dimension of values?

One could easily be misunderstood here as asking which aspect of higher-order thinking thinks about values. But this is not at all what is meant. A person who is learning a foreign language at first learns words, phrases, declensions and conjugations, but then eventually learns to think in the language—in Greek or Chinese or Icelandic. A person who is learning history at first memorizes names and places and dates, but eventually comes to think historically. Likewise, learning to think in values is different from the beginner's learning to think about values. One learns to think valuationally as one learns to think historically, geographically, algebraically, musically or dramatically.

I want to make it clear that I am not equating valuation with evaluation. Evaluation has to do with deliberate appraisal or assessment. Valuation, instead, can be downright uncritical: prizing rather than appraising, esteeming rather than estimating.

Thinking in values is always "intentional" in the phenomenological understanding of that term, in the sense that one who values (or thinks valuationally) is always directing his or her thinking at something. Thus, thinking that values rational beings is respectful thinking. Thinking that values what is beautiful is appreciative thinking. Thinking that values what is virtuous is admiring thinking. If it values what is sentient, it is considerate thinking. If it values what needs to be sustained, it is cherishing thinking. If it values what suffers, it is compassionate thinking. If it values the fate of the world and its inhabitants, it is concerned thinking.21 In general, we can say that thinking that values value is caring thinking.

Buchler has made the case that there are three modes of judgment: saying, making and doing—or to put it another way, asserting, arranging and acting. This tripartite approach applies equally well to thinking, for if we want to know what the components are of "higher-order" thinking, we would not be mistaken if we replied that they were "critical thinking, creative thinking and caring thinking," for these are ways of expressing how we think when we are thinking well. When we are thinking critically, we are applying to our thinking the rules, criteria, standards, reasons and orders that are reasonable and appropriate to it. When we are thinking creatively, we are inventing ways of expressing ourselves and/or the world around us; we are trying to go beyond the ways we have thought in the past; we are imagining details of possible worlds and proposing unprecedented innovations. When we are thinking caringly, we attend to what we take to be important, to what we care about, to what demands, requires or needs us to think about it. Higher-order thinking, in other words, is not value-free. It has ethical and aesthetic aspects from which it is inseparable. To think about what can be done in the world is to have to take into account the environmental impact of so doing. To think about grandparents or children—people who may not be able to take care of themselves—is to have to take into account how they are to be cared for, and to give such thinking priority because of its importance. Caring thinking is not content merely to classify; it must rank and grade, assign priorities, distinguish between what is urgent and what is not. Lurking behind one's valuations is always one's sense of proportion, that idiosyncratic perspective in terms of which some things appear to one to be close by and huge while other things seem to be ever so far off and of miniscule dimensions.

In commending the three-part division of thinking (as well as judgment) into the saying, making and doing equivalents of the critical, the creative and the caring, I have no intention of portraying these as watertight or airtight compartments. Some contexts are so inhospitable to reflection that to approach them critically is to be creative, and in such contexts, both the critical and the creative are values. Some instances of creative thinking demand to be precisely organized and reasoned, in which case they exhibit the value of being critical as well as of being inventive. And some instances of caring thinking are conceptually powerful as well as stylistically innovative. So, the three-part division is only for purposes of analysis: there is no claim that thinking is in fact divided into three such regions.

Taking thinking pluralistically, even in such a limited way as I have been doing here with the critical, the creative and the caring, is, nevertheless, a very different thing from considering it to be unitary and indivisible. The unitary notion of thinking is that thinking can be about anything at all, but it remains one and the same thing regardless of what it happens to be about. I am arguing, instead, that thinking is always contextually situated: one who thinks historically thinks differently from one who thinks mathematically. These are disciplinary differences. The same is true of aspectual differences: one who thinks critically thinks differently from one who thinks in a caring fashion.

Rodin is not thinking in words as he sculpts Le Penseur: he is thinking in marble, or whatever the sculptural medium. But he also is thinking in a caring fashion, for he could not have produced the work he produced had he not valued thinking so highly, had he not taken it so seriously. Le Penseur is a sculptural hymn to thinking as Leaves of Grass is a poetic ode to human experience. Each in its own way exhibits technique, invention and commitment.

4. Caring as Thinking

I have been emphasizing that caring is not a causal condition of thinking—or need not be, in any case—but can, instead, be a mode or dimension or aspect of thinking itself. Thus, caring is a kind of thinking when it performs such cognitive operations as scanning for alternatives, discovering or inventing relationships, instituting connections among connections and gauging differences. And yet, it is of the very nature of caring to obliterate distinctions and rankings when they threaten to become invidious and, thereby, outlive their usefulness. Thus, caring parents, recognizing that "being human" is not a matter of degree, just as "being natural" is not a matter of hierarchy, do not attempt to assign rankings to their children; yet at the same time they recognize that there are significant differences of perspective so that things have different proportions in one perspective than they have in another. Those who care, therefore, struggle continually to strike a balance between that ontological parity that sees all beings as standing on the same footing and those perspectival differences of proportion and nuances of perception that flow from our emotional discriminations.

I do not feel, however, that I am in a position to offer a definition of caring thinking in the sense that I might contend that the criteria I offered for critical thinking could be combined to form a definition of that aspect of cognition. What I can offer, instead, is an inventory of a number of varieties of caring thinking which I sense to be neither non-overlapping nor exhaustive. They are, however, prominent features of the terrain and we would do well to take note of them.

(a) Valuational thinking

John Dewey has pointed out that we must distinguish between prizing and appraising, between esteeming and estimating, between valuing and evaluating.22 To value is to appreciate, to cherish, to hold dear; to evaluate is to calculate the worth of. The difference between prizing and appraising, as well as between pairs of similar terms, is a difference of degree: there is no prizing that does not contain at least a germ of appraisal and no appraisal that does not contain at least a germ of prizing.

In any event, when we prize, admire, cherish and appreciate, we are engaged in valuing something for the relationships it sustains. To value a gift is to value the thing given for the feelings it expresses towards us from the donor of the gift. The gift is valuable because it establishes connections between our attitudes, dispositions and emotions and those of the donor, connections that might be difficult to establish in any other fashion.

Thus, to appreciate a work of art is to find joy in observing the relationships—of the parts of the work to one another and to the whole—of which the work is comprised. To appreciate the cinematography of a film is to enjoy the pictorial relationships that the camera makes available to the viewer, as well as the relationships between the camera work and the acting, directing, music and other aspects of the film. Likewise, to find a face interesting or beautiful is to admire and enjoy the relationships among the features as well as the relationships within the features. If pressed, we can always cite these relationships as the reasons for the admiration we experience.

To value is to pay attention to what matters, to what is of importance. Never mind the seeming circularity: that what matters is of importance precisely because we pay attention to it. It is only partially true. Things in nature are neither better nor worse than other things, but when we compare and contrast them in particular perspectives, we pay attention to and, therefore, value their similarities and differences. In itself, a lake is neither better nor worse than an ocean, and a hill is neither better nor worse than a mountain. It is only in particular contexts that we experience them relationally, hence, valuationally. It is in this sense that curators care for works of art, doctors care for health, and curates care for souls: these people are caring people in that they attend to what matters to them, and their doing so is no "merely emotional" display, but has genuinely cognitive worth.23

(b) Affective thinking

Psychologists have developed three models in terms of which to understand the relationship between affect and cognition. The first views emotion as the consequence of cognitive processes, while the second sees cognition as the cause and affect as the consequence. A third model ("the cognitive-emotional fugue") depicts the relationship as a "complex interplay of processes, similar to the themes of a fugue, which are often lost and reappear."24

While the fugal theory is closer to the position being advanced here-that emotion can be a form of thinking, -the two are nonetheless not the same. The disagreement remains as to whether or not emotions can, in at least some cases, be classified as cognitive, as instances of thinking.

Consider this example. You observe an innocent child being abused and you are indignant. Does your indignation qualify as thinking? Surely your indignation involves an awareness that the abuse of someone innocent is out of place, and it involves the additional awareness that the indignation you feel is warranted. Indignation is unlikely to be produced by an isolated causal event: it needs a reason. The reason may not be a strong one or a good one, but it is a reason, not a cause, and it is part of the indignation itself.

Thus, the indignation one feels is the development of one’s initial realization that someone innocent is being hurt, as well as one's realization that such behavior is inappropriate. What is inappropriate in a given context is lacking in warrant, lacking in justification. The abuse is felt to be inappropriate; the indignation is felt to be appropriate. And appropriateness is just as much a cognitive criterion as is, say, coherence or relevance.

This is a matter whose importance for moral education cannot be underestimated. Frequently, our actions follow directly upon our emotions. One hates, one behaves destructively; one loves, one behaves amicably, and so on. Consequently, if we can temper the antisocial emotions, we are likely to be able to temper the antisocial conduct.

Is it possible to teach children to consider the appropriateness of having the emotions they have? The answer seems fairly obvious: in their upbringing of their children, parents and siblings constantly contribute to the shaping of the young child's emotional outlook. By reward and reproof, they let the child know which emotional expressions are deemed appropriate in a given context and which are not. (Their rationales may be fairly idiosyncratic: laughing at funerals is often reproved, but not crying at weddings.) But if there can be an education of the emotions in the home, there can be an education of the emotions in the school and, indeed, there already is.

(c) Active thinking

From what has just been said about emotions being cognitive, it should hardly be surprising to find actions being described as sometimes cognitive. There are languages of gesture and other bodily movements, such as facial expressions. And even an act that does not have a standardly assignable meaning may take one on when performed in a suitable context.

Few discussions of caring fail to note the ambiguity between the use of the term to mean caring for or about (in the sense of having an affectionate feeling for) and caring for (in the sense of taking care of or looking after). We might want to distinguish these senses by classifying the first with affective thinking and the second with active thinking.

Thus, one type of active thinking is curatorial—a conserving of what one cherishes. People try to preserve their looks or their youth: they take steps to save the things they value from the maw of time. Others seek to preserve abstract values, as logicians seek to preserve the truth of the premises of an argument in its conclusion and as translators seek to preserve the meaning of a statement from one language to another.

Another type of active thinking is illustrated by such professional activities as sport. Thus, a game such as baseball is meticulously rule-guided in certain respects, but open and criterion-guided in other respects. Some situations call for merely mechanical behavior, such as moving away from the plate after having struck out. Other situations call for creative judgments, such as trying for a triple play. We call such activities cognitive because, like most professional conduct, they are shot through with judgments.

This requires a fresh look at the notion of judgment, such as that provided by Buchler. Every judgment, according to Buchler, is expressive of the person who performs it and is appraisive of that person's world.25 Throw a baseball and the way you throw it will be expressive of you, while the way you throw it will also take into account such considerations as the velocity of the wind, the readiness of the catcher and the proficiency of the batter. Every act is an intervention that tests one's circumstances.

There is, thus, a language of acts as there are languages of words, and if the meanings of words are to be found in their connections with the sentences that incorporate them, so the meanings of acts are to be found in their relationships to the projects and scenarios that embody them. Their meanings are also to be found in their relationships with the consequences that flow from them, as well as in their contextual relationships.

Action, then, is protective, conservative thinking—taking pains to maintain what is already in place—and it is interventionist—making pains to change what is in place. Either way it represents caring, for those who are uncaring neither seek to maintain those things that do matter nor do they seek to establish anything that would matter.

(d) Normative thinking

A word is in order here with regard to the thinking in tandem which yokes thinking about what is with thinking about what ought to be. To some extent, this is a matter of moral upbringing in the home and in the schools. We insist that the child consider, with every instance of desiring, what ought to be desired and, thereby, link the desired always with the desirable. The desirable is one example of the result of reflection upon actual practice, for inquiry into what is done should be able to come up with a sketch or blueprint for what ought to be done, if the inquiry is sufficiently sustained.

This conjunction of the normative with the actual intensifies the reflective component of both action and caring. One who cares is concerned always with the ideal possibilities of caring conduct, so that reflection upon the ideal becomes part and parcel of the attention one pays to what is actually going on. Since the normative element is always cognitive, its inseparability from other aspects of caring simply adds further to their claim to cognitive status.

The poverty of mindless empiricism stems from its failure to consider anything more than what is, while the failure of mindless rationalism stems from its failure to consider anything other than what ought to be. Students, however, cannot be allowed to be trapped in such airless categories. Those able to reflect upon who they are need to be able to take into account, as well, the sort of persons they want to be and ought to want to be. Those able to consider the world as it is should be helped to consider the sort of world they want to live in and the sort of world they ought to want to live in. Such agenda may well occupy them for the larger parts of their lives, but it will be time well spent.

I have been insisting on the addition of caring thinking to critical and creative thinking in any factoring out of the major aspects of higher-order thinking for two major reasons: (i) Caring has ample credentials as a cognitive enterprise, even though it consists of low visibility mental acts like screening, filtering, gauging, weighing and so on, rather than high visibility acts like inferring and defining. But the cognitive is not restricted to acts of high visibility alone, just as the vital bodily organs are not limited to those that are engaged in dramatic pumping activities such as the heart and the lungs. The liver and the kidneys are vital organs too, for the discriminations they perform are essential to our lives.

(ii) Without caring, higher-order thinking is devoid of a values component. If higher-order thinking does not contain valuing or valuation, it is liable to approach its subject matters apathetically, indifferently, and uncaringly, and this means it would be diffident even about inquiry itself. In attempting to make a case for caring thinking, I in no way intend to disparage critical and creative thinking, just as in making a case for applied thinking, I would not aim to disparage theoretical thinking. I am aware, however, that the almost Manichean dualism of rationalism/irrationalism is one to which many people are profoundly committed, so that a reorientation to reasonableness would be, for them, far more easily said than done.

I suspect we feel emotions when we have choices and decisions to make, and these choices and decisions are the leading edges of judgment. Indeed, so important is the role of the emotion in the thinking that leads up to the judgment and in the thinking that leads down from and away from it that we would be hard put to tell the one from the other. In fact, they may very well be indistinguishable, they may very well be identical, in which case it would make perfect sense to say that the emotion is the choice, it is the decision, it is the judgment. And it is this kind of thinking that we may well call caring thinking, when it has to do with matters of importance.

Endnotes

1 For example, see Robert H. Ennis, "A taxonomy of critical thinking dispositions and abilities," in Joan Boykoff Baron and Robert J. Sternberg (eds.), Teaching Thinking Skills, Theory and Practice (New York: Freeman, 1987), p. 10, as well as Robert Sternberg, "Critical thinking: its nature, measurement and improvement," in Frances R. Link (ed.), Essays on the Intellect (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1985), p. 46.

2 See Lauren B. Resnick, Education and Learning to Think (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1987), pp. 1-3, 44-50.

3 It is commonly held, among psychologists, that emotions are expressed feelings and that feelings, or affect, are unexpressed emotions. See, for example, Paul D. MacLean "Sensory and Perceptive Factors in Emotional Functions of the Triune Brain," in Amelie O. Rorty (Ed.), Explaining Emotions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 11-12.

4 Benjamin Bloom et al., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Vol. 1: The Cognitive Domain, (New York: David McKay, 1956-64).

5 "In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions," Teachers College Record.

6 "Reason and Passion," in R. F. Dearden, P. H. Hirst, and R. S. Peters (Eds.). Education and the Development of Reason. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, pp. 208-229.

7 Scheffler, ibid.

8 Robert C. Solomon, "Emotions as Judgments," in The Passions (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 185-191.

9 Martha Nussbaum, "Emotions as Judgments of Value," The Yale Journal of Criticism, 1992, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 201-212.

10 Kathleen Wallace, "Reconstructing Judgment: Emotion and Moral Judgment," Hypatia, Summer 1993, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 61-81.

11 Cf. A. C. Lloyd, "Emotion and Decision in Stoic Psychology," in J. M. Rist (Ed.). Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978, pp. 233-246.

12 I have relied considerably here on Josiah B. Gould's The Philosophy of Chrysippus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970).

13 Op. cit., p. 245.

14 Ibid., p. 244.

15 Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, in Jonathan Barnes (Ed.). The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, Vol. II.

16 Hans Friedrich August Von Arnim. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta. New York: Irvington, 1986, III, p. 461.

17 Martha Nussbaum, "Emotions as Judgments of Value," The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1992, p. 209.

18 Ibid p. 210.

19 Benj. S. Bloom et al., (eds.).

20 Justus Buchler, Towards a General Theory of Human Judgment, New York: Columbia University Press, 1951, pp. 46-54.

21 See Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 4-5.

22 John Dewey, Theory of Valuation, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), p. 5. Dewey suggests that prizing means a holding precious or holding dear, while appraising means assigning a value to. Prizing has a definite personal reference and "an aspectual quality called emotional." In appraising, on the other hand, the intellectual aspect is uppermost.

23 Harry Frankfort writes, "How is it possible, then, for anything to be genuinely unimportant? It can only be because the difference such a thing makes is itself of no importance. Thus, it is evidently essential to include, in the analysis of the concept of importance, a proviso to the effect that nothing is important unless the difference it makes is an important one." From The Importance of What We Care About (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 82. I have reservations, however, about Frankfort's contention that caring has to do with what matters to one personally in contrast to what concerns one interpersonally and, hence, ethically.

24 Michael Lewis and Linda Michalson develop this fugal theory in Children's Emotions and Moods, New York: Plenum Press, 1983, pp. 87-93.

25 Op. cit., p.