"Thinking" is the practice of thought.
To be honest, I thought (eh) we were talking about "thinking" as "reasoning" (and mostly in an original sense).
Obviously if you redefine the concept as "having any thought whatsoever", then anything goes. I personally don't consider "reading a fact in a book" or "associating sounds to concepts" as "thinking" in the terms of the upthread conversation, but you clearly do.
I don't think (eh) we can agree on much in this conversation given the premises.
Oh, is that what you meant when you said "my first touch will still be sub-par."?
> I personally don't consider "reading a fact in a book" or "associating sounds to concepts" as "thinking" in the terms of the upthread conversation, but you clearly do.
I don't think you can learn philosophy without learning a language. I don't think you can learn the scientific method without first learning some scientific facts.
Please elaborate, where would you draw the line between facts+language, and "reasoning"?
Isn't that conflating practice with thinking? You would also never invent football on your own if you'd never heard of it. If you want to be good at football, letting Leo teach you is likely to be a lot faster and produce better results than not learning from anyone.
Everyone adopts thought systems from others, you do and I do. Failing to admit that is to be actually bad at thinking and fail to admit you're human. It's not possible to have only original thoughts, and even if it was, it wouldn't be practical.
Try to be honest with yourself and think about how many things you know for certain, that you weren't taught by someone else. How many facts do you know that you've verified yourself first hand? How do you know the sun is 93 million miles away, or that there are electrons in your CPU? I trust scientists who've studied it and thought about it, I haven't verified those things myself. How do we even understand words and speak languages? As children, we learned everything about the world from others, including how to think.
Isn't this is a feature, not a bug? We learn from each other over time, and we'd be nowhere without people having adopted and then built upon the thought systems of others.