Daniel Dennett's Seven Tools For Thinking

In this extract from Daniel Dannett's new book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, he reveals some of the lessons life has taught him:

• Use Your Mistakes - Try to acquire the weird practice of savouring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you and go on to the next big opportunity. But that is not enough: you should actively seek out opportunities just so you can then recover from them.
• Respect Your Opponent - How to compose a successful critical commentary:  

1.  Attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."
2.   List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement). . Mention anything you have learned from your target.
3. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
4. One immediate effect of following these rules is that your targets will be a receptive audience for your criticism

• The Surely Klaxon -  When you're reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for "surely" in the document and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word "surely" is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument.
• Answer Rhetorical Questions - A rhetorical question has a question mark at the end, but it is not meant to be answered. That is, the author doesn't bother waiting for you to answer since the answer is so obvious that you'd be embarrassed to say it!  Here is a good habit to develop: whenever you see a rhetorical question, try – silently, to yourself – to give it an unobvious answer. If you find a good one, surprise your interlocutor by answering the question.
• Employ Occum's Razor - The idea is straightforward: don't concoct a complicated, extravagant theory if you've got a simpler one (containing fewer ingredients, fewer entities) that handles the phenomenon just as well. If exposure to extremely cold air can account for all the symptoms of frostbite, don't postulate unobserved "snow germs" or "Arctic microbes".
• Don't waste you time on rubbish - Let's stipulate at the outset that there is a great deal of deplorable, second-rate stuff out there, of all sorts. Now, in order not to waste your time and try our patience, make sure you concentrate on the best stuff you can find, the flagship examples extolled by the leaders of the field, the prize-winning entries, not the dregs. Notice that this is closely related to Rapoport's rules: unless you are a comedian whose main purpose is to make people laugh at ludicrous buffoonery, spare us the caricature.
• Beware of Deepities -  A deepity is a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That's a deepity.