Thinking Tools and Worked Examples
A genre of my posts
Years ago, I read Daniel Dennett’s Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2013). It’s a great book and greatly influenced how I view both philosophical thinking in everyday life and effective communication. The book begins with a quote from Bo Dahlbom: “You can’t do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can’t do much thinking with your bare brain.” Dennett says that good thinking requires equipping your brain with a wide variety of thinking tools and getting practice using them. This is also a good model for one genre of post on this blog: Finding thinking tools and creating worked examples.
Thinking Tools
Thinking is like construction, it requires tools. Sometimes these are simple thinking tools, like Occam’s Razor or formal syllogisms. Sometimes these are labels, names, and categorizations. For example, in geometry proofs the first step is often labeling sections of the diagram. Sometimes these are tropes, common patterns that recur over and over again which call out for a name (this is the magic of Zvi effectively turning AI journalism into coverage of evolving tropes). Thinking tools can also be algorithms or useful heuristics, like cost-benefit analysis or Fermi estimation. Analogies and metaphors are also important thinking tools that organize how we do mental work.
All of these are “simple” thinking tools in the sense that they have “fewer moving parts”, like the difference between a screw and a motor.
Intuition Pumps and Thought Experiments
A thought experiment is either a proof (rigorous demonstration of a principle leading to QED) or an imagined scenario under which various ideas can be tested (such as ethical dilemmas). Examples on the proof end of the spectrum include Galileo’s thought experiment disproving Aristotle on falling objects and Einstein deriving the equivalence principle from someone falling off a roof. Examples closer to the abstract scenario end include the trolley problem, the drowning child, and the Ship of Theseus. All of these proper thought experiments are relatively “rigid” in their construction and operation.
Intuition pumps are different. From Dennett (2013):
Other thought experiments are less rigorous but often just as effective: little stories designed to provoke a heartfelt, table-thumping intuition—“Yes, of course, it has to be so!”—about whatever thesis is being defended. I have called these intuition pumps. […] some intuition pumps are excellent, some are dubious, and only a few are downright deceptive. Intuition pumps have been a dominant force in philosophy for centuries. They are the philosophers’ version of Aesop’s fables, which have been recognized as wonderful thinking tools since before there were philosophers. […] These are the enduring melodies of philosophy, with the staying power that ensures that students will remember them, quite vividly and accurately, years after they have forgotten the intricate surrounding arguments and analysis. A good intuition pump is more robust than any one version of it.
These are short stories and vignettes which organize different salient facts to illustrate an argument. Examples include the Chinese Room, Mary’s Room, even the Turing Test. The most grand example would be the tiered construction of Plato’s Kallipolis.
More complicated thinking tools have more moving parts, which means more chances for error or malfunction, but they can also do more work.
Worked Examples
You know a tool can be useful by seeing it being used. The core of many good essays isn’t describing the thinking tool but seeing it do work. Worked examples consist of walking through what using the tool looks like in practice. However, it doesn’t have to be merely a case study, a historical event, or even in reality. Mythology largely consists of worked examples of the consequences of observing or transgressing customs, rituals, or obligations. Fairy tales, comics, folklore, novels, film are all containers that can hold more complexity than the confines of a single thought experiment or intuition pump. Sometimes the story is the thinking tool itself but many times the story is the stage on which you can see the tool operate.