Lecture
Intuition pump is a thought experiment structured to allow the thinker to use their intuition to develop an answer to a problem.
The term was coined by Daniel Dennett . In Consciousness Explained , he uses the term to describe John Searle's Chinese room thought experiment, characterizing it as having been designed to evoke intuitive but incorrect responses by formulating the description in such a way that important implications of the experiment are hard to imagine and tend to be ignored.
In the case of the Chinese room argument, Dennett believes the intuitive notion that a person manipulating symbols seems inadequate to constitute any form of consciousness ignores the requirements of memory , recall , emotion , knowledge of the world, and rationality that a system would actually need to pass such a test. "Searle certainly does not deny that programs might have all this structure," Dennett says. "He simply discourages us from imagining it. But if we want to imagine the case properly, we are not only entitled but obliged to imagine that the program Searle is simulating by hand has all this structure — and more, if we can imagine it at all. But then, I submit, it is no longer obvious that there is no genuine understanding of the going-on anecdote."
In his 1984 book Elbow Room , Dennett used the term in a positive sense to describe thought experiments that make it easier to understand complex subjects or reason about them by drawing on intuition:
A popular strategy in philosophy is to construct a thought experiment of a certain kind, which I call an intuition pump . ... Intuition pumps are cleverly designed to focus the reader's attention on "important" features and distract the reader from getting bogged down in hard-to-grasp details. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this. Indeed, one of philosophy's highest callings is to find ways of helping people see the forest and not just the trees. But intuition pumps are often abused, though rarely.
Dorbolo defines intuition pumps as thought experiments aimed at "transforming" the audience's thinking, rather than simply posing a philosophical problem. However, the distinction between intuition pumps and thought experiments in general is not entirely clear; some authors use the two terms as synonyms. Brendel goes further, separating "bad" intuition pumps, which hinder considered reflection, from "legitimate" thought experiments, which are admissible in philosophical argumentation. Dow suggests that intuition pumps occupy a middle ground between Moorean facts or assumptions so obvious that they refute arguments to the contrary, and conceptual analysis .
Dennett's definition from the book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting , 1984:
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""A popular strategy in philosophy is to construct a thought experiment of a certain kind, which I call an intuition pump ... Intuition pumps are cleverly constructed so as to focus the reader's attention on "important" features and distract the reader from getting bogged down in following the details. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this. Indeed, one of philosophy's highest callings is to find ways of helping people see the forest and not just the trees. But intuition pumps are often abused, though rarely.
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Dennett believes that intuition pumps, like analogies, should be used to illustrate an argument , rather than as an argument in themselves. The listener should be aware of the shortcomings and limitations of their own philosophical intuition and not treat it as automatically reliable. As Richard Feynman put it: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool."
Intuition pumps are useful when they help the listener get a feel for an argument. They become problematic when they appeal directly to the listener's philosophical intuition as a reliable black box, rather than as something shaped by evolution for its own purposes and subject to cognitive biases .
Outside philosophy, intuition pumps are often abused to argue for claims . The most common problems with them are the use of false premises to structure the thought experiment so that it leads to one and only one (mistaken) answer, or the use of a false analogy around which the experiment is built. Dennett calls John Searle's " Chinese room " argument a classic intuition pump.
Ludwig Wittgenstein demonstrated the problem of relying solely on intuition in a conversation with Elizabeth Anscombe about the flat Earth :
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""He once greeted me with the question: "Why do people say it was natural to think that the Sun went round the Earth rather than that the Earth rotated on its axis?" I replied: "I suppose, because it looked as if the Sun went round the Earth." "Well," he asked, "what would it have looked like if the Earth had rotated on its axis?"
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Since religion offers little factual information to work with, theological argumentation tends to rely heavily on intuition pumps that treat a person's philosophical intuition as a reliable black box .
One common argument attempting to explain why a "loving god" cast human souls out of heaven to live on Earth goes something like this:
Imagine God and all the happy little human souls playing in the perfection and goodness of Heaven . Since we cannot truly understand good without evil , we could never truly appreciate God's and Heaven's infinite goodness if we had never experienced evil. So God creates a universe outside heaven and sends us into it, specifically to Earth, to experience evil, so that we can truly understand God's infinite goodness and love when we return to heaven.
This plays on the fact that people tend to perceive things in relative terms intuitively, so that something is harder to define without its opposite (in this case, good versus evil). The intuition pump distracts us from all the flawed assumptions on which it is built, such as: why couldn't God simply have cordoned off a section of heaven as an "evil zone"? Why did he need to make something separate from heaven at all? If we cannot truly understand God's goodness without experiencing evil, this contradicts his omnipotence, because it means he cannot create anything "smart enough" to understand his goodness without also creating evil. And, most importantly, how do you know that?
Intuition pumps also tend to run rampant in politics and political theory, especially where there is little to no empirical evidence to support beliefs. Dennett mentions that classic examples of this are the various "state of nature" theories proposed by political philosophers over the years. This typically involves constructing a theoretical starting point for humanity in order to justify some moral or ethical system that "naturally" follows from that state of nature. While these thought experiments can be useful to some degree, they tend to ignore evidence from the social sciences about how people actually behave, in favor of a purely theoretical approach.
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