Daniel DennettIntuition pumps and other tools for thinking

Chapter 1: Introduction
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 . I coined the term in the first of my
public critiques of philosopher John Searles famous Chinese Room
thought experiment
Chapter 2: Making mistakes
Better to make as many good mistakes as possible
Cant go through life without any mistakes whatsoever

Some basic tools for thinking:
Rapoports rules
To give as charitable an interpretation to someone elses arguments
How to compose a successful critical commentary:
o 1. You should attempt to re-express your targets position so
clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, Thanks, I wish Id
thought of putting it that way.
o 2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are
not matters of general or widespread agreement).
o 3. You should mention anything you have learned from your
target.
o 4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of
rebuttal or criticism.
Sturgeons Law
Sturgeons law is usually put quite crudely: 90 percent of everything is
crap
Occams razor
The idea is straightforward: dont concoct a complicated, extravagant
theory if youve got a simpler one (containing fewer ingredients, fewer
entities) that handles the phenomenon just as well.
Occams broom
Inconvenient facts are whisked under the rug by intellectually dishonest
champions of one theory or another
Using lay audiences as decoys
Using lay audiences to ensure that others are able to understand exactly
what you are trying to say, particularly as you have to explain these ideas
to them explicitly
Rathering
Rathering is a way of sliding you swiftly and gently past a false dichotomy
The surely operator: a mental block
The use of the word surely to make an assertion that the author hopes
will be accepted by the reader without any justification
Rhetorical questions
Attempting to answer rhetorical questions might be to ones benefit,
particularly if an intuitively unobvious answer can be thought of
Deepity
A proposition that seems both important and true, but only achieves this
effect because of its own ambiguity

Tools for thinking about language
This shared property, the meaning (of the two sentences in their
respective languages), or the content (of the beliefs they express), is a
central topic in philosophy and cognitive science. This aboutness that, for
example, sentences, pictures, beliefs, and (no doubt) some brain states
exhibit, is known in philosophical jargon as intentionality , an unfortunate
choice as a technical term, since outsiders routinely confuse it with the
everyday idea of doing something intentionally
Having knowledge as a matter of degree (e.g. the statement daddy is a
doctor might be understood by a child in different degrees at different
stages of their lives)
Sellars (1962, p. 1) famously said, The aim of philosophy, abstractly
formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of
the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.
The manifest image is the world as it seems to us in everyday life, full of
solid objects, colors and smells and tastes, voices and shadows, plants and
animals, and people and all their stuff: not only tables and chairs, bridges
and churches, dollars and contracts, but also such intangible things as
songs, poems, opportunities, and free will. Think of all the puzzling
questions that arise when we try to line up all those things with the things
in the scientific image: molecules, atoms, electrons, and quarks and their
ilk. Is anything really solid?
I proposed folk psychology as a term for the talent we all have for
interpreting the people around usand the animals and the robots and
even the lowly thermostatsas agents with information about the world
they act in ( beliefs ) and the goals ( desires ) they strive to achieve,
choosing the most reasonable course of action, given their beliefs and
desires.
The intentional stance is the strategy of interpreting the behavior of an
entity (person, animal, artifact, or whatever) by treating it as if it were a
rational agent who governed its choice of action by a consideration
of its beliefs and desires.
How do we interpret the behavior of an entity?
o The physical stance is simply the standard laborious method of the
physical sciences, in which we use whatever we know about the
laws of physics and the physical constitution of the things in
question to devise our predictions.
o The designed stance:
1. that an entity is designed as I suppose it to be, and
2. that it will operate according to that designthat is, it
will not malfunction.
o the intentional stance , a subspecies of the design stance in which
the designed thing is treated as an agent of sorts, with beliefs and
desires and enough rationality to do what it ought to do given
those beliefs and desires. Its applications to a chess move:
First, list the legal moves available to the computer when its
turn to play comes up (usually there will be several-dozen
candidates).
Now rank the legal moves from best (wisest, most rational)
to worst (stupidest, most self-defeating).
Finally, make your prediction: the computer will make the
best move.
o The personal/Sub-personal distinction
At different levels of distinction, the individual body parts
can be said to have different levels of human-like capability
o A cascade of homunculi
Homuncular functionalism
The AI programmer begins with an intentionally
characterized problem, and thus frankly views the
computer anthropomorphically: if he solves the
problem he will say he has designed a computer that
can [e.g.,] understand questions in English. His first
and highest level of design breaks the computer
down into subsystems, each of which is given
intentionally characterized tasks; he composes a
flow chart of evaluators, rememberers,
discriminators, overseers and the like. These are
homunculi with a vengeance. . . . Each homunculus in
turn is analyzed into smaller homunculi, but, more
important, into less clever homunculi. When the
level is reached where the homunculi are no more
than adders and subtractors, by the time they need
only the intelligence to pick the larger of two
numbers when directed to, they have been reduced
to functionaries who can be replaced by a machine.
The particular virtue of this strategy is that it pulled
the rug out from under the infinite regress objection.
According to homuncular functionalism the ominous
infinite regress can be sidestepped, replaced by a
finite regress that terminates, as just noted, in
operators whose task is so dull they can be replaced
by machines. The key insight was breaking up all the
work we imagined being done by a central operator
and distributing it around to lesser, stupider agents
whose work was distributed in turn, and so forth.
o Wonder tissue
The term wonder tissue is a thinking tool along the lines of
a policemans billy club: you use it to chastise, to persuade
others not to engage in illicit theorizing. And, like a billy
club, it can be abused. It is a special attachment for the
thinking tool Occams Razor and thus enforces a certain
scientific conservatism, which can be myopic.
However, it does seem to be a tool which is used to simply
acknowledge that we cannot have the ability ot understand
what is ahead
o Using registers as a simulation to understand how computers
work