Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

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. Given Dennett's other writings, it's not surprising to find him often refer to evolution as a rich mine for many of the tools. Variation, making mistakes, and generating lots of ideas to pick the best ones are all traits of the evolutionary process. Dennett also draws on work by diverse thinkers, from Wittgenstein to Stephen Jay Gould to Douglas Adams, to illustrate the power and pitfalls of language and thought. His trademark subtle (and not so subtle) wit and familiarity with a vast amount of pop culture and science is clearly apparent in the writing. The book will definitely reward those who like to think about thinking, and it's one I can definitely see myself periodically savoring like a plate of diverse appetizers.