Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

Dennett's collection of seventy-seven thinking tools — thought experiments, heuristics, and argumentative moves that he has developed over a lifetime as a philosopher of mind. The tools range from Occam's Razor and reductio ad absurdum to Dennett's own inventions ("surely" as a warning sign, the "Deepity", staging your intuition before trusting it). For product direction the book is not directly applicable and that is the point — it trains the kind of disciplined reasoning that makes every other application sharper. Dennett writes with unusual clarity for a philosopher, and the book is designed to be dipped into rather than read cover-to-cover. Read alongside his Kinds of Minds for the more focused treatment of consciousness.