For those who subscribe to such an understanding, doing science essentially becomes attempts to read and interpret the Open Book of Nature correctly.
In any true epistemic act, however, one cannot start from either what is unclear or what one is ignorant of, using it to grasp what is clear and understandable.
As such, knowing as an act has often been formulated as the progress of one’s mind from ‘what-is-already-known’ to ‘what-is-still-unknown’.
To qualify as a valid epistemic act, therefore, any correct method of reading to be applied to the Book of Nature must reflect such a guiding formula.
Yet, reading involves thinking in most, if not all, cases. Thinking being an integral cognitive component in science must also be guided and regulated by the same epistemic principle of progressing from ‘what-is-already-known’ to ‘what-is-still-unknown.’
In fact, it is in the light of this principle that thinking, in ‘ilm al-mantiq, the discipline of logic, is described as “the mental act of (1) putting into meaningful order (2) what one has already known in order to (3) attain what one is still ignorant of.”
It is clear that there are three central and constitutive elements embedded in such a description. One constituent, indicated by (2) above, is the units of knowledge already in one’s possession-what one already knows-which is regarded as the “material,” or “matter,” of thinking.
Another constituent, indicated by (1), is the way one mentally organizes those units of knowledge resulting in certain mental patterns, certain arrangements.
It is the way one mentally relates one unit with another unit, or a group of other units of knowledge, in such a manner to allow for meaning to become manifest.
This second constituent of thinking is thus considered to be the “form,” or “structure,” of thinking.
The third constituent represents the noetic progress, the successful movement of one’s mind to new units of knowledge (such as deriving right conclusions or making correct inferences) after the first and second constituents above have been obtained.
This progress, indicated by (3) above, seems necessary once one’s mind knows certain facts and manages to relate those facts correctly.
In short, thinking is like one putting the right form to the right material so that one will arrive at true meaning.
As such, defects in thinking may well be due to the defects in its material or its form, or to flaws in both.
Thinking in most cases involves the mind’s attending to signs.
In fact, one of the Qur’Änic terms for thinking is tawassum (al-Qur’an, 15: 75), being a derivative of the word wasm (meaning “sign,” “mark,” or “brand”) which is also the root word for ism (name). The term signifies the mental act of scrutinizing the various signs or marks in the process of knowing.
As signs may take several forms, there is bound to be an intimate relation between the forms of thinking and those of signs.
For example, signs may be of the nature of evidence or may assume the quality of effect-indicator, these two by no means being mutually exclusive.
Depending on which of those two forms the signs involved are taking, thinking itself may take at least one of its two modes: one being al-tafakkur and the other, al-tadabbur (or al-tadbir).
The former is the mind’s attending to the signs-as-proofs, whereas the latter, to the signs-as-ends.
In this respect, al-tafakkur is more or less a synonym of al-istidlal (inference), which is another term for thinking which concentrates on proofs (dalil).
Such being the case, one finds in the Kitab al-Ta‘rifat (The Book of Definitions) of al-Sayyid al-Sharif ‘Ali al-Jurjani that both al-tafakkur and al-tadabbur are mental acts or dispositions, but while the former is the mental act of looking at proofs, the latter examines the ends or results.