ABSTRACT
The activity of thinking is difficult to encapsulate in watertight compartments. Of its nature, it permeates every mental function, it reprocesses everything that perception has filtered or that memory has reconstructed. Dividing this chapter into separate sections once again corresponds more to established practice in the sector than to a real distinction between functions. Problem solving and planning are classic show pieces in artificial intelligence. In contrast, reasoning was, originally, more the area of psychology. Later it also became the realm of cognitive science. Accepting this sort of division does not however imply postulating each function is characterised by different basic abilities. The reader who desires to explore this complex domain may refer to the exhaustive and well-structured Thinking and reasoning, by Alan Garnham and Jane Oakhill (1994).
