The Little Book of Thunks

260 questions to make your brain go ouch!

Ian Gilbert

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781845903398
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A Thunk is a beguiling question about everyday things that stops you in your tracks and helps you start to look at the world in a whole new light. The author guides you through the origins and uses of Thunks and demonstrates how this powerful little book can develop philosophical thinking for all ages... remember there are no right or wrong answers to these questions. How liberating is that...? Winner of The Author's Licensing and Collecting Society Award for Educational Writing by the Society of Authors.

Part I

The Origins and Uses of Thunks

Philosophy is what’s left when science
has answered all the other questions

What is a Thunk?

A Thunk is a beguilingly simple-looking question about everyday things that stops you in your tracks and helps you start looking at the world in a whole new light. At the same time it encourages you to engage in verbal fisticuffs with the people sitting next to you and, if used properly, always leads to severe brain ache.1

The Thunks in this book cover areas of human existence, including truth, justice, reality, beliefs, the natural world, the human condition, art, beauty, right and wrong, good and bad, life and death, war, religion, love, friendship and whether Marmite tastes nice.

Any one Thunk can start to help people see that all communication is riddled with potholes that, just maybe, we need to look out for including intentions, definitions, presuppositions, opinions, assumptions, approximations, biases, prejudices, non sequiturs, and everything else that happens when a politician’s lips move.

What’s more, ‘thunk’ is also the noise the brain makes when it starts to think about a Thunk and, as such, is the one of the first onomatopoeias to provide hours of endless fun since Ker-Plunk.

What is a Thunk for?

It is easy to go through life without ever lifting it up, giving it a shake and looking at it from a different angle. When we do this we start to realise that what we thought were facts are actually opinions, what we took to be knowledge is actually supposition, and not everything you read in Daily Mail is true. A Thunk will help you to look with new eyes at everyday occurrences such as the wind, broken-down cars, and things that are black. And, by helping you to look deeper and question harder, may even help you to get more out of life – which is a big claim for a little book – but such is the power of Thunks.

In the words of one eight-year-old boy after his first session, “I’ve just realised how big life is.”

Where do Thunks come from?

There is a thinking skills programme that originated in the US called Philosophy for Children – known by those in a hurry as P4C – that has a growing following in the UK. A professor of philosophy named Matthew Lipman realised that his students could tell you what philosophers such as Socrates or Plato thought but couldn’t think for themselves. Which is a bit like putting your trunks on to read a book about swimming. He put together a series of stories and a special way of working that could be used with children of all ages to help them develop a more philosophical way of thinking. Thunks grew out of my work in this area with children in primary and secondary schools (and even tax inspectors) and are a way of quickly and easily getting people thinking and talking philosophically.

How does a Thunk work?

Socrates was a clever man and a teacher who would help his students simply by asking questions, something we now call a ‘Socratic dialogue’. Through questioning in this way, people will either develop a more profound and reasoned appreciation of why what they feel to be true is true or untrue, or else may end up no longer really knowing what a tree is. Could go either way.

Although the idea of using questions to generate thinking goes back thousands of years, even great recent philosophers such as Wittgenstein have suggested that a perfectly respect able philosophical essay could comprise entirely of questions. Or jokes. Or both. He also knew the benefits to thinking of laughter and once asked the wonderful Thunk, “Why don’t dogs simulate pain? Is it because they are too honest?”

What are the benefits of Thunks?

Check out a list of famous Swiss people and somewhere between Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim and Ursula Andress you will find the name Jean Piaget.

Many present day insights into childhood development come from his observations and theories from the last century – theories that can now be backed up by neuroscience, despite having been dismissed at one time or another.2 It was Piaget who suggested that – and I urge you to copy this line out and stick it in a place where you’ll see it daily – “Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do.” Thunks tap into this definition of intelligence and help us move away from the idea that the intelligent person is the one with the good memory and a grasp of basic grammar. (If you don’t believe me, listen to Brain of Britain on BBC Radio 4 – it’s a memory game of abstruse facts, and nothing to do with the application of knowledge in new environments. I bet few of the winners over the last decade could fix a Fiesta headlight with a courgette as someone I know once did.)

I was asked to ‘motivate’ a conference of tax inspectors who were coming to terms with the fact that the Inland Revenue and HM Customs and Excise were being combined into one large organisation – HM Revenue & Customs. (Before I went, I typed ‘motivated tax inspectors’ onto Google™ and received the reply, “Your search returned no documents.”) These were people at the top of their tree for whom the world was soon to be unlike it had ever been previously. They were going to be asked questions that had never been asked before and were expected to come up with answers – answers that couldn’t be found in books, on websites, or in anyone’s brain. I took them through a number of Thunks for precisely the reason that Piaget explains.

In a similar vein, someone once told me an Oxbridge admissions tutor was asked how they differentiated between A grade A-level students who are clever and A grade A-level students who have been well schooled and have a good memory. “Easy,” the tutor replied, “I simply ask them a question no one’s ever asked them before.”

In a school setting Thunks are not only useful as a discrete thinking skills activity, they can also be used in all areas of the curriculum, for example, at the beginning of a new topic. One science ...