ABSTRACT
What I wish to say about education for thinking presupposes a particular view of the nature of thinking. Accordingly, my principal task in this initial chapter is to formulate and defend that view. The chapter is organized as follows: section 1 offers a guiding metaphor which informs the entire volume. In the second section I delineate the distinction between virtues and skills before going on in section 3 to discuss whether thinking is a skill. In section 4 I ask whether thinking comprises operations that are domain specific or that generalize across domains. Section 5 examines attempts to identify different modes of thinking. A brief discussion of the value of thinking concludes the chapter.
