Experimentos mentales: En torno a la categoría de “bombas de intuiciones” en la discusión entre Searle, Dennett y Hofstadter

A large number of objections were made after Searle published the Chinese Room thought experiment. Apparently, he met many of them convincingly. However, a new criticism was raised by Dennett and Hofstadter in 1981, which centered not only on this thought experiment, but also on many others in the philosophy of mind. In particular, they criticized the dubious reliability of those scenarios that help enact intuitions about the experimenter’s own mind. Thus, they established a new category for such thought experiments: intuition pumps. Oddly enough, Dennett has created his own intuition pumps, and that has happened even though it is rather unclear when this term is applied correctly. In this article, I argue that the difficulty to characterize intuition pumps and their utility is not only explained by the problematic nature of the mind, but also by the alleged dogmatism of materialists and dualists.