Suppose Pat says that Mike “has a thing about redheads.” What Pat means, roughly, is that Mike has a stereotype of a redhead that is rather derogatory and influences Mike’s expectations about, and interactions with, redheads. It could turn out that Mike does have a thing, not an idea or a thought or a belief or an image or any of the other traditional things that furnish our conscious experience, but a bit of sub-personal cognitive machinery in his brain, that is about redheads in the sense that it systematically comes into play whenever the topic is redheads or a redhead, and adjusts various parameters of Mike’s cognitive machinery, making flattering hypotheses about redheads less likely to be entertained, or confirmed, making relatively aggressive behavior vis-à-vis redheads closer to implementation than otherwise it would be, and so on.
What is the aim of this intuition pump? It is simply an attempt to suggest that the familiar refrain in support of the language of thought—“What else could it be?”—might have a good answer that would take the wind out of the sails of those who find it obvious. What is the aim of this intuition pump? It is simply an attempt to suggest that the familiar refrain in support of the language of thought—“What else could it be?”—might have a good answer that would take the wind out of the sails of those who find it obvious. I
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
