Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

Dennett assembles the thinking tools he has used across a career in philosophy of mind, defining an intuition pump as a thought experiment designed to make an intuition available for examination, and noting that they can be used honestly or to smuggle in conclusions.

The general tools include making mistakes deliberately and studying them; Rapoport's rules for criticism, which require restating your opponent's position so well that they would adopt your version, listing what you have learned from them, and only then criticising; the identification of what he calls a deepity, meaning a statement that is trivially true on one reading and profound but false on another; occam's broom, meaning the concealment of inconvenient facts; and the surgical use of the phrase surely as a marker for where an author knows their argument is weak.

The substantive tools address meaning, evolution, consciousness and free will, which are the areas Dennett worked in. He covers the intentional stance, meaning the practice of predicting a system's behaviour by treating it as having beliefs and desires; the argument that Darwinian processes produce design without a designer; his critique of the Chinese Room, of qualia and of zombie arguments; and his compatibilist position on free will.

The book works as both an introduction to Dennett's positions and as a set of general tools, and he is explicit about which is which. His positions on consciousness are minority views among philosophers and he presents them as settled more than the state of the debate warrants. The general tools, particularly Rapoport's rules and the deepity concept, are usable immediately and independent of the philosophy.