WordNet
n. thinking that is coherent and logical [syn: reasoning, logical thinking]
Usage examples of "abstract thought".
Biology is not really my field, but their cranial capacity seems quite adequate for abstract thought.
In this view a single cognitive occurrence contains both content and object, the content being essentially mental, while the object is physical except in introspection and abstract thought.
This arid, almost scholastic tradition argues that, if one can identify appropriate mind properties and processes, then one can model these properties and processes in abstract thought-experiments or sets of mathematical symbols and subsequently incarnate them (or, perhaps better to say, 'inmachinate' them) into silicon components, optical switches or magnetic monopoles just as well as into the complex bits of carbon chemistry out of which evolutionary processes have generated real brains.
Then the powers of abstract thought are separated from the universal powers of growth which alone were previously present.
In the course of his later life man has these powers of abstract thought, but they are part of his physical organism, and are not taken up into his etheric being.
In other words, those portions of the brain believed to be most important for abstract thought seem better developed and larger in modem man than in Neanderthal man.
The former word dealt only with abstract thought of a 'law,' this with a 'Lawgiver.
Together they faced a situation accessible only to abstract thought.