Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
Good Fit
- Readers curious about philosophy, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind who want to avoid dry academic prose
- Readers looking for practical tools for "how to think," who want a deeper grip on familiar ideas like Occam's Razor
- Readers who enjoy intellectual adventure stories (like the von Neumann and Feynman anecdotes) told with real wit
- Readers who want to work through "big" philosophical questions — free will, consciousness, meaning — step by step, through concrete examples
Not a Fit
- Readers who accept philosophy only in the form of formal, mathematical proofs and see a playful tone as unseriousness
- Readers who like to read a book linearly like a novel and may struggle to adjust to a structure fragmented into 77 separate "tools"
- Readers philosophically opposed to Dennett's materialist, non-religious account of consciousness who won't be able to approach the book without bias
In the Preface, Dennett explains how the book grew out of a philosophy seminar he taught at Tufts University in spring 2012 — he deliberately picked thirteen first-year students with no philosophy background, drawing on their help to make the book accessible to non-specialists.
The Introduction opens with the claim that "thinking is hard" — according to neuropsychologist colleague Marcel Kinsbourne, this difficulty comes from a constant struggle against easier, tempting paths that turn out to be dead ends.
Dennett illustrates this with a famous legend about John von Neumann, who — even faced with a simple "two trains and a bird" riddle — instinctively reached for the most convoluted (infinite series) solution, when an instant, easy one was available; this supports the idea that "the smarter you are, the smarter you are for taking the easy way when it's available."
The chapter then sorts thinking tools into categories: labels (vivid names), examples, analogies and metaphors, "scaffolding" (a structure that takes time to build but then makes a whole class of problems easy), and finally Dennett's own coinage, "intuition pumps" — small thought experiments designed to provoke sharp intuitions.
The chapter closes with two concrete intuition pumps: the "Weird Jailer" (who unlocks every cell door each night, yet the prisoners are still not "free" to leave) and "Jewels in the Trash" (valuable gems found in a street trash can, but with no real opportunity to recognize or use them) — both serve as a gentle first taste of the free-will discussion the book takes up in far greater depth later on.
- A style that grounds serious philosophical topics in everyday comparisons (carpentry, blacksmithing) and legends about famous scientists (von Neumann, Feynman)
- A modular structure — 77 separate "tools" that can be read in any order, making the book useful as a reference as well as a cover-to-cover read
- Intellectual honesty that keeps a critical distance from Dennett's own concepts (intuition pumps), openly admitting some are excellent, some dubious, and a few outright misleading
- A warm, personal Preface voice that thanks everyone from his students to his editor in detail for helping shape the book
Author of "The Mind's I," which Dennett co-edited — a classic written in a similarly playful, philosophical style
The same author's more systematic, central work on the philosophy of consciousness
A similarly popular-science exploration of how the mind works through language and cognition (already reviewed on our site)
After the Introduction, the book splits into five major parts: General Thinking Tools (Occam's Razor, Sturgeon's Law, Reductio ad Absurdum, etc.), Tools for Thinking about Meaning or Content, Tools for Thinking about Consciousness (the Chinese Room, Zombies and Zimboes), Tools for Thinking about Evolution, and finally an entire part devoted to Free Will.
In its final sections, Dennett states his own position plainly: consciousness is not some "magical" substance but the product of the brain's computational processes, and free will does not conflict with determinism — it is, instead, rooted in a rich web of causality; the "Weird Jailer" example in the Introduction was the first seed of this argument.
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