The key ideas

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

Daniel C. Dennett, 2013

How do you object in a way that makes the other person first agree with your summary of their view? Why does the phrase “love is just a word” sound wise while saying almost nothing? The philosopher Daniel Dennett gathered the thinking tools he used all his life and applied them to hard questions about consciousness and evolution. His conclusions are debatable, but the tools can be useful to anyone.

Who it is for

For those who love to argue and want to do it more honestly, for readers of popular science, and for anyone who wants to spot the traps in other people's reasoning and their own.

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them—especially not from yourself.

What the book is about

A physicist has a particle accelerator, a biologist has a microscope. So what does a philosopher work with? Daniel Dennett's answer was: tools for thinking. In this book he gathered several dozen such techniques and thought experiments. Some will come in handy in any argument. Others Dennett applies to the hardest topics: what consciousness is and how evolution creates complexity without design.

An important frame right away. You can take the techniques from the book regardless of the author's views. Dennett's conclusions about consciousness and evolution, however, are his philosophical position, and it has serious opponents.

Ahead are rules that help you argue so that you are heard, a short phrase that sounds wise and says almost nothing, and a scientist who has lived her whole life in a black-and-white room. If you're choosing a book about how to think, that's already a good start.

Idea 1. Making mistakes usefully

Dennett opens his list of tools unexpectedly: with the skill of making mistakes. According to Dennett, a mistake is one of the ways to discover what you don't know yet. He points to evolution: it tries out variants blindly, and most of them fail. But out of a huge number of trials, astonishingly complex things gradually grow.

The chief secret, according to Dennett, is not to hide your mistakes, especially not from yourself. A hidden slip can rob you of the main benefit it offers: the lesson.

You find a calculation error in a report. You can quietly fix the file and forget about it. Or you can take a minute to write down exactly where things went wrong, and next time check that spot first.

A mistake you've examined can show the limits of your understanding more precisely than a successful attempt. A hidden mistake risks being repeated.

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About the author

Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) was an American philosopher and for many years a professor at Tufts University. He wrote about consciousness, evolution and free will.

All books by this author: Daniel C. Dennett

Terms from the book

  • Thought experiment
  • Intuition pump: Dennett's term for a thought experiment or story that nudges you toward a particular conclusion through intuition. Such a pump can help you grasp an idea, but it can also quietly lead you to a debatable conclusion.
  • Rapoport's rules: Four steps of criticism that Dennett takes from Anatol Rapoport: restate the position honestly, name the points of agreement, say what you have learned, and only then object. The author's advice, not a scientific method.
  • Sturgeon's law: A tongue-in-cheek observation by the writer Theodore Sturgeon: ninety percent of everything is crap. The figure is arbitrary; nobody has measured it.
  • Deepity: Dennett's term for a phrase with two readings: one is undeniable but trivial, the other sounds profound but is unproven.
  • Skyhook: Dennett's image for an explanation that lifts something complex “from above” and is not itself explained by anything. He contrasts it with a crane, an explanation built from simpler steps. The author's image, not a scientific term.

All terms

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