Theoretical thinking is also called "scientific theoretical thinking". A kind of rational thinking formed by human beings on the basis of knowledge and empirical facts to understand the essence, laws and universal relations of things. It is characterized by abstraction. Different from the kind of thinking based only on empirical facts and carried out according to the inertia of experience, that is, simple empirical thinking, theoretical thinking is not limited by the special time and space of empirical facts. It uses scientific abstract methods such as analysis, synthesis, induction and deduction to transcend facts, grasp infinity from finiteness, understand absoluteness from relativity, understand general from particularity, and grasp essence through phenomena, Get regular knowledge. Logic, concept and category are the basic elements of theoretical thinking. Philosophical viewpoints play a leading role in theoretical thinking, and philosophy of each era has a significant impact on the development of theoretical thinking. Theoretical thinking is a product of history, with different contents and forms in different times. It plays a great role in the development of modern science. Theoretical thinking and empirical thinking complement each other. [1]
Theoretical thinking refers to the thinking activities based on scientific principles and concepts to solve problems. For example, the theory of "water is the source of life" is used to explain the impact of drought on everything in the world. Also called logical thinking.
Concepts, images, intentions and ideas are the basic elements of theoretical thinking. Concept is the reflection of the essential attribute of things; Image is the integration of association, fantasy and imagination, and the main means of artistic creation and appreciation; Intention refers to the cognitive meaning and evaluation meaning of the connotation of the concept itself. For example, the concept of wheat is not only a description of a real thing, but also reveals the function that can be used as food. It has emotional elements, which reflects the intention of the subject; Ideation is a combination of concepts, images and intentions. The idea is regulated in the description of reality (abstract in concrete) and transcended in the normative reality (concrete in abstract). That is to say, as the rules and standards of concrete things, ideas are used to explain things and standardize things in turn. People use concepts as tools, rules and yardsticks to sort out experiences, accept what they have to say (in Mr. Feng Qi's language), and achieve sense data Classify, complete an abstraction. The judgment of thinking and the self justification of thinking are two major characteristics of theoretical thinking. From the perspective of ideology, the judgment of thinking is the fact that the subject is aware of or aware of, and makes a judgment on the fact. That is, to make a judgment on the object (perceptual material) that the subject thinks about, that is, to use ideas (mainly concepts) in the context, to use judgment to combine ideas with facts, and to use language to express them. The self justification of thinking refers to the self-consciousness of the subject and self thinking. "As the subject of consciousness, the self subject runs through a series of consciousness activities. The subject not only has an understanding of the object and content of thought, but also has a conscious psychological self-consciousness of the subject itself." That is, "thinking" presents a conscious identity of what is and is also expressed as a consciousness of self consciousness, that is, reflection. "Reflection" in Kant's《 Critique of Pure Reason 》It is regarded as a psychological state in which we find the subjective conditions to reach the concept, which is about the awareness of the relationship between the representation we have obtained and the source of cognition, namely, the objective object; In Hegel's view, it is regarded as "post thinking", "thinking", "deep thinking", "meditation", etc., which is understood as the relationship between thought and existence; It is regarded as introspection by Locke; In Leibniz's view, it is defined as the attention to what is inside us. Hegel believed that "reflection takes the thought itself as its content, and strives to make the thought aware of itself as its thought". "Only when the thought does not pursue other things but only considers itself as the object of thought,... that is its most excellent activity". The process of reflection is also a process in which the cognitive ability of the subject is constantly improved, the personality is constantly cultivated, and the subject is constantly from spontaneity to self-consciousness, from freedom to self doing. Reflection highlights the character implication of theoretical thinking. Logical thinking, virtual thinking and dialectical thinking are the three basic levels of theoretical thinking. Logical thinking is the basic way of thinking for the subject to know the object and obtain knowledge. From its perspective, the way to acquire knowledge should be: what, why, how, who, and so on, to achieve truth and truth. It is at the basic level in theoretical thinking.
Virtual thinking is a form of thinking that transcends people's concept of reality, which widely exists in religious mythology, culture and art and other fields. Imagination is the basic element of virtual thinking. As Marx and Engels pointed out, "Division of labor only becomes division of labor when material labor and spiritual labor are separated. From this time on, consciousness can realistically imagine; it is something different from the consciousness of existing practice; it can realistically imagine something without imagining something real. From then on, consciousness can get rid of the world and construct 'pure' theory, theology, philosophy, morality, etc. ". Imagination enables human beings to surpass themselves and the world, and also marks human thinking with "virtual". "Virtual thinking is a special thinking tool for human beings to transcend reality and construct an ideal life world. It has played a huge creative role in human history and has rich cultural values." For example, religious myths, legends, legends, etc., people can not only imagine the images of things that have already appeared in the objective world, You can also imagine the image of things that have not yet appeared in the objective world or even are impossible to appear. People have the ability to reconstruct and create new images through association, imagination, decomposition and transformation of the original perceptual images. It expresses people's demand for transcending reality. Virtual thinking is based on "virtual reality", such as virtual riding with whip and virtual sailing with rowing in operas; There is fictitious capital in economics; "Network society" includes virtual family, virtual love, virtual driving, online games, immersion experience, etc.
Some people say that the basic element of virtual thinking is a virtual concept, which is also wrong. For example, the Monkey King and Baigujing in Journey to the West are empty concepts, that is, they do not exist in the objective world; However, virtual substances (such as symbols, pictures, etc.) in cyberspace cannot be said to be virtual concepts. Virtual thinking in cyberspace takes virtual substance as the basic element. Internet users can use these virtual substances at will to quickly build a "city" and tell a strange story through the processing of virtual thinking. Some people think that virtual thinking only exists in religious activities, which is one-sided. In fact, within the scope that human practice cannot reach, it is the stage of virtual thinking activities. For example, the prospect of the future development of human society, literary and artistic creation, cyberspace, etc., were and are the "frames" of virtual thinking. As an important level of theoretical thinking, virtual thinking not only coexists with theoretical thinking, but also "forces" theoretical thinking to gain infinite charm in a broader space and time. Dialectical thinking is the core level of theoretical thinking. Its essential element is dialectical contradiction. It is reflected in the relationships between subject and object, subjective and objective, continuity and discontinuity, comprehensiveness and one sidedness, system and non system. The coordinates, angles, directions and scales of the cognitive subject are always historical and specific, the breadth and depth that each generation's thinking can reach is always limited, and the existence and development of objective things are always unlimited, thus forming a dynamic contradictory movement between the two. If thinking wants to express things, it needs to break the continuous things, quiesce the moving things, abstract the thinking object from the whole, and sometimes cut off its connection with other things temporarily. This process itself contains the internal contradiction of formalized and symbolic thinking. Lenin pointed out: "If we do not cut off the uninterrupted things, simplify and coarsen the living things, do not divide them, and do not ossify them, then we cannot imagine, express, measure, and describe motion. Thought always describes motion coarsely and rigidly, not only in thought, but also in feeling; This is true not only for motion, but also for any concept. " When expressing, measuring and describing "reality", human thinking always pursues non contradiction in the form of simplification and linearity, but "Russell paradox"“ Berkeley paradox ”The emergence of "etc." is also the "opposite" to the non contradictory thinking. The appearance of "paradox" is an inevitable thing in human thinking, and also makes us realize that its existence is "reasonable". It shows that the "reliability" and "truth" of any theory are only relative to the historical conditions and certain preconditions, and the absolute and eternal "reliability" and "truth" do not exist. This is further Godel's incompleteness theorem Proved. In fact, Hegel has long pointed out that as many concepts occur, we can propose as many antinomies as possible. For example, when people put forward the system theory to sublate the mechanical theory, they consciously realized the existence of non systems, which are oscillation theory, uncertainty principle Principle of relativity , unorganized theory, etc. The non system is the opposite of the system, that is, the confusion and ambiguity, the breaking of the system, the extension, differentiation and development of the "system" category, and the manifestation of the specialization of the "connection" category. That is to say, something loses its "systematicness", but it cannot lose its "connection" with other things, and it may also be transformed into "non system". Therefore, dialectical thinking is generated from the dialectical nature of the thinking process, taking dialectical contradiction as the manifestation of its own existence and as the principle of its own activities. Dialectical contradiction enables dialectical thinking to "stand and maintain", and it is also a "frame" for theoretical thinking to reach a new realm [2] 。 
