Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking

"I didn’t want to pick manuals, but the one that is closest to one is Dennett’s Intuition Pumps . I should say that I’ve taken all these books off my shelf because I don’t have great factual recall. I read a book and even a week later, let alone a year later, I probably can’t give a good précis of it. But what a lot of good books do is that they change the way you think a bit and in that way, they leave their trace. It’s about how you think as much as what you think. Dennett’s Intuition Pumps is a really good book. It does have a lot of these standard critical thinking things in it. But he’s very witty, which is not very normal for philosophers. So in amongst Occam’s Razor and all that kind of stuff, he’s also got more quirky, unusual things. He has the idea of a ‘deepity,’ a phrase which he’s coined. As I understand it, a deepity is an utterance which sounds profound, but if you examine it, isn’t at all. Social media is a great promoter of deepities, these little quotes, which make you go, ‘Ah great, fantastic.’ And you’re clicking through them so quickly, that you don’t even ask what it means; it just sounds great and you share it and you go on to the next deepity. That’s right. And it’s very, very readable. One time I interviewed him, he said something like, he’s a serious philosopher, but not a solemn one. The point being that you can take your philosophy seriously without taking yourself too seriously and being too pompous. And I think that’s a good thing. Absolutely. There are typical characteristics of good thinkers but not every thinker has every one. Here’s another example from the book: the ‘surely’ operator. I love this one. Whenever somebody says ‘surely’, what they really mean is that this is not something I want to have to argue for. I want you to take it for granted. By saying ‘surely’, you’re inviting the person to think this is something which shouldn’t be questioned, which is a big red flag that you should. I’m not sure this book has done as well as some of his other ones, partly because it’s a bit of a hodgepodge. It’s arranged into sections, but it’s not systematic. You dip into it and take things from it. But I quite like that as well. It goes back to what I was saying earlier. This book doesn’t trick the reader into thinking that if they follow the steps in this book, they will be a great thinker. It’s saying, ‘there are all these tricks and traps and tools that are useful, but actually, you’ve got to work out what the best ones are in any given occasion and try and apply them.’ Because that’s the other thing: it’s all very well to have a thinking tool, but how do you apply it? Bad thinkers know the tools and misapply them. An example I’ve often used concerns a philosopher who had written a good book on reasoning and knew his stuff. He was talking about Andrew Wakefield, who published a paper about the MMR vaccine in the Lancet , a top medical journal. The paper didn’t actually strongly link the vaccine to autism, funnily enough. It was the press conference and other things afterwards that made the stronger connection. Anyway. It turned out that he had been funded by people who had an interest in discrediting the MMR vaccine and wanted to sue the manufacturers. The Lancet withdrew the paper when they found out about that. And this philosopher said, ‘There’s this thing called the genetic fallacy, which means that you shouldn’t judge an argument on the basis of where it comes from, you should judge an argument on the strength of the argument. So this paper should be judged on the strength of the scientific evidence and the matter of who funded it is irrelevant.’ Now, this is someone who’s got hold of a thinking tool, and he’s applying it, but he is misapplying it because actually, in science, experimental bias is a huge factor. Therefore you do have to think about who’s paying for it. So what in certain contexts is a fallacy—don’t think of the origins when doing the justification—is a legitimate objection in scientific research because of the psychological effects of experimenter bias and, also, fabrication of evidence. So you can have all these tools at your disposal, but you still want to think very carefully, ‘Is this the time to apply it? Am I applying it in the right way?’ I think that’s true. In fact, having a nose for philosophy can be a nice segue into the next book."