intuition pump

An intuition pump is a term coined by Daniel Dennett for a thought experiment structured to elicit intuitive answers about a problem. In Dennett's book Consciousness Explained he uses the term pejoratively to describe John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, describing it as designed to elicit intuitive but incorrect answers by formulating the description such that important implications of the experiment would be difficult to imagine and tend to be ignored.

In the case of the Chinese Room argument Dennett argues that the intuitive notion that a person manipulating symbols seems inadequate to constitute any form of consciousness ignores the requirements of memory, recall, emotion, world knowledge and rationality such a system would actually need to pass such a test. "Searle does not deny that programs can have all this structure, of course," Dennet says, "He simply discourages us from attending to it. But if we are to do a good job imagining the case, we are not only entitled but obliged to imagine that the program Searle is hand-simulating has all this structure - and more, if only we can imagine it. But then it is no longer obvious, I trust, that there is no genuine understanding of the joke going on."

Dennett has also used the term in a positive sense to describe thought experiments which facilitate the understanding of or reasoning about complex subjects by harnessing intuition.

See also

• Philosophy of Mind
• Consciousness

External links

• Dennett, D.C., "Intuition Pumps", pp.180-197 in Brockman, J., The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, Simon & Schuster, (New York), 1995.

Daniel Dennett
Concepts	Greedy reductionism · Heterophenomenology · Intentional stance · Intuition pump · Multiple Drafts Model
Selected works	Brainstorms · The Mind's I · Elbow Room · Consciousness Explained · Darwin's Dangerous Idea · Freedom Evolves · Breaking the Spell

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