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Product Details
Hardcover: 512 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (May 6, 2013)
If you have enjoyed any of Daniel Dennett's other books you will enjoy this. It is a pleasing, humorous and insightful journey into a gallery of mundane and profound thinking tools drawn from a wide-ranging set of disciplines, from literature and science to psychology and philosophy. It's worth noting that this is not really a "how to" book. Instead it's more like a survey of common as well as uncommon tools that human beings consciously and unconsciously use to both understand the world better and communicate and empathize with each other. Not surprisingly, given Dennett's profession, the bent is slightly more philosophical although the book is easy to read and appreciate.
The book starts with the simplest of tools, such as making mistakes. Dennett illuminates how making mistakes is not just ok but desirable since it's perhaps the only way to hone a system of thinking into a useful device. Other parts of the book cover concepts like reductio ad absurdum, Occam's Razor and the wittily-named Occam's Broom which is sometimes used nefariously to sweep arguments under the rug. There's a fair amount of ground Dennett covers before he gets to the concept stated in the book's name - intuition pumps. Intuition pumps refer to anything - from thought experiments to linguistic devices - that somehow make us bypass the process of rigorous thinking and reach a revelation primarily through intuition. One of the virtues of the book is how it describes examples of both good and bad intuition pumps including sleights of hand used by politicians and pseudoscientists. I was quite impressed by Dennett's attention to even very simple tools invoked through common expressions; for instance one of the fallacies he describes is the use of the word "rather" that's routinely used to set up a false dichotomy.Read more ›
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I found myself flipping back through the pages, looking for the core ideas that interconnected the fairly short chapters. This author definitely did some thinking, way more than average for most academic texts. The ideas were there, so I was not disappointed. This text has some hidden ideas, which is more than what most books can say. Maybe not everyone would find the same ideas, but there were hints of concepts like a 'coherent brain' and 'psychic people' --- but these New-Agey type concepts were selected carefully, and only underpin the more advanced, although less lexical interpretations of the text. The lexical interpretation is perhaps the most major interpretation, and would involve a lot of inferencing and referencing of --- I suppose --- the entire body of reasoning, including all kinds of things that aren't obvious outside of core academia. For reasons like this, this book is not really easy to pick up or put down --- in a good way. I originally assumed this text to be simplistic, with a few good ideas, perhaps original ones. What I came away with was something far different: a real, whole-cloth approach to life, from a real, authentic mind.
While some of his opinions are on the abstruse side, and the text certainly seems dense to some if not all readers, like Aristotle, there is cohesiveness and content, in spite of the obstruction. Basically the only thing better than this in philosophy is a book of aphorisms, or perhaps something even more intelligent (or more likely, more concise), if that is possible. I suspect this guy could take some lessons from Strunk & White, but like all philosophers, he's above par for his chosen game. I don't regret reading this book, and that says something. I think I set a high standard, and this text basically exceeded mine.Read more ›
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Dennett's recent offering is accessible and enjoyable to read. The title suggests that it covers the topic of thinking tools. However the book doesn't include very many general-purpose thinking tools. Those that he does offer are quite basic. I liked the idea of a "boom crutch" as a malfunctioning thinking tool, though. Most of the book is devoted to thinking tools that are useful to budding philosophers interested in free will, consciousness, zombies and Searle's Chinese room. Dennett spends a lot of time on his misguided critics. The David Chalmers and John Searle of the world. Alas, I can't take the opinions of these guys seriously. Dennett's side won these battles decades ago, AFAICS. There's quite a bit of material on consciousness. Finally, Dennett has a big section on free will. The controversy over free will mostly seems like a battle over what the term "free will" means. Terminology is important, but it's hard to get as excited as Dennett does over this debate. Dennett gives plenty of examples where more than just terminology is involved. However, I don't really see it - most of the real disagreement on this topic arises out of the issue of what the term "free will" means. I think that Dennett has been mostly overtaken in the "thinking tools" department by the new rationalists. For the most part, their tools are more interesting, advanced and general purpose than the ones Dennett offers here.
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It's always a pleasure to read Dennett, even when you disagree with him (as I do about some of what he writes on evolutionary theory, for instance). And this collection really gives the reader a good taste of Dennett's brilliant, witty, insightful writing. Of course, if you are already familiar with his prodigious output, there will be relatively little new here, but it's still nice to get a single place where so many gems are collected for one's reading and thinking pleasure. That said, I still find Dan's treatment of some people and subject matters (Searle, Gould) unnecessarily strident, and perhaps below the standards of intellectual discourse that he himself sets in one of the essays in the book - and this, of course, quite regardless of how uncharitable some of his opponents may or may not have been in turn. Read it, disagree with it, discuss it with friends and colleagues, it will be worth your time.
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This item: Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking
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