Abstract
Current efforts both to conceptualize good thinking and to teach thinking are dominated by what might be called the general processes view, which holds that good thinking consists in a number of general cognitive processes supported by appropriate skills and strategies. This view suggests that thinking works top-down through the activation of general processes that access context-specific knowledge and call subprocesses. However, contemporary scholars in this issue and elsewhere have proposed constituents of good thinking quite different from processes, strategies, and skills—in effect a broader ontology of the kinds of things that figure in good thinking. We define three categories in this broadened ontology in addition to processes: the language of thinking, abstract conceptual structures, and dispositions. It is argued that these categories bring with them a less top-down view of how thinking works: Different constituents of thinking are activated by the particulars of an occasion of thinking and by one another in a process that might be termed coalescence. The greater range of constituents and the nature of coalescence call for a richer conception of teaching thinking. It is suggested that the notion of enculturation provides such a conception.