thoughtforthought

Thought forthought is a term used to describe the practice of thinking about one's own thinking in order to improve further reasoning, learning, or decision making. In this sense it encompasses metacognitive evaluation of the validity of beliefs, the identification of biases, and the articulation of internal arguments for external scrutiny.

The term is not tied to a single formal theory. It appears chiefly in informal discussions in cognitive science, education, and AI contexts as a mnemonic for meta-cognitive strategies. It is closely related to meta-cognition and higher-order thinking, and is sometimes used to signal attention to the transparency and tractability of one's reasoning.

Applications include reflective journaling, self-explanation protocols, and prompt design that encourages users to reveal intermediate reasoning steps. In artificial intelligence, analogous ideas appear in chain-of-thought prompting, where systems are guided to produce intermediate reasoning traces to improve accuracy. Thought forthought, when used in AI contexts, emphasizes the evaluation of those traces rather than simply producing them.

Critiques warn that meta-cognitive practices can be time-consuming, cognitively taxing, and prone to overconfidence if not guided. Because the term is informal and variably defined, its precise meaning may vary across disciplines and communities. See also meta-cognition, chain-of-thought, reflective practice.