bigideas

Reading this interesting post by Matt Brown at Weitermachen (hat tip to the 50th Philosophers’ Carnival at Philosophy Sucks), I was reminded that the things philosophers call “thought experiments” are actually as interesting to think about in general as they are in particular. It happened to coincide with some reading I’ve been doing about “intuition pumps”.

An “intuition pump” is, according to Daniel Dennett, a kind of thought experiment that’s designed to develop an intuition about something. The “Chinese room” that Searle described in his famous essay “Minds, Brains, Programs” was the first example, and when Dennett called it an “intuition pump” he meant it as an insult; he meant, in paraphrase, that it was an attempt to force our intuitions to form in a particular way, whereas in fact what was needed wasn’t intuitive reasoning but rigour. Thinking intuitively about something is generally not a great way to reach conclusions about it because, as we all know, our intuitions are often wrong or only tell us part of the story.

In Dennett’s essay “Quining Qualia“, however, he sets out a grand total of fifteen thought-experiments that he explicitly calls “intuition pumps”. What’s changed? Well, in this essay he’s interested in showing that an intuitive idea most of us have is actually nonsense. He can’t do that rigorously, because the idea itself isn’t rigorous and, he claims, can’t be made so. You can’t talk rigorously about something that’s inherently badly-defined.

Instead, you can work at the intuitive level to show that your intuitions are contradictory or nonsensical. His target here is the things called “qualia“; a quale is an unanalysed, pretheoretical and prelinguistic “impression” or “feeling”. The first paragraph of Dennett’s paper gives the gist of the idea; this posting by Keith Frankish at The Splintered Mind goes into more detail. A good example of a quale is the pain we feel when we touch a hotplate, and the fact that we withdraw our hand immediately — before we’ve had time to think “oh, that’s rather hot” — is taken as evidence for our intuition that we had the quale first, then analysed it afterwards.

So Dennett installs a number of “intuition pumps” each of which tests our intuitions about qualia in a different way. Then he argues, in each case, that the intuition has failed somehow, and in particular that it leads us to a contradiction. In doing so, he gives an intuitive argument that our intuitions are wrong.

If you’re sceptical about qualia then it makes sense, I think, to attack them in this way. Maybe 17 is too many “intuition pumps”, but the intuition he’s tilting at is a strong one — I doubt you could find many non-philosophers who would doubt it, and nor indeed would many philosophers either. And since each intuition pump is inconclusive on its own, it’s perhaps best to overstate the case.

(Incidentally, the term “quining” comes from Dennett’s Philosophical Lexicon, a rather arch collection of philosophical in-jokes, although some are pretty funny if you happen to get them)