The Nature of Attention

In this paper I consider Simone Weil’s notion of attention as the fundamental and necessary condition for mystical experience, and investigate Iris Murdoch’s secular adaptation of attention as a moral attitude. After exploring the concept of attention in Weil and its relation to the mystical, I turn to Murdoch to address the following question: how does Murdoch manage to maintain Weil’s idea of attention, even keeping the importance of mysticism, without Weil’s religious metaphysical background? Simone Weil returns to the importance (...) of attention throughout her writing. To attend, for Weil, means to empty oneself of all that is personal, primarily one’s will, which Weil sees as the essence of the human individual. This act imitates God’s act of creation, considered as a withdrawal in order to let something other than himself exist. Since such withdrawal represents God’s supreme act of love, salvation for human beings lies in the attempt to do likewise. By giving up one’s will, while desiring God with all of one’s soul, one creates the conditions for God to descend into the soul. This ‘passive activity’ is attention. Weil’s writings had a deep impact on Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy. In particular, Weil’s concept of attention is carried into Murdoch’s thought almost unchanged, with one striking exception: the absence of God in Murdoch’s system. Just as surprisingly, Murdoch at the same time maintains that mysticism and spirituality are crucial for morality, nor does she wish to sever the connection between attention and mysticism. Is Murdoch being inconsistent? I believe not. But the idea of attention as a mystical concept, within a metaphysics which has no room for God, requires further examination. For Murdoch, attention is the central capacity of the morally good person. Attention is, like in Weil, connected with an emptying of the self (for Murdoch the Ego) and a renunciation of will, in order to let something external make an impression in the subject. However, in Murdoch’s philosophy such external impression is not given by God, but by reality itself. Thus far, it appears, the notion of mysticism would be unnecessary. Yet for Murdoch reality is not something that we passively perceive, but something that requires a moral faculty – attention – made up of selflessness and desire for the good, in order to be apprehended. Two elements of mysticism then begin to surface: firstly, apprehension of reality requires a faculty that is not purely intellectual, but that involves the whole of the individual, including intuitions that one may be unable to explain (which Murdoch is happy to call ‘the soul’); secondly, the reality thus apprehended is considered as transcendent, insofar as its truth, infinitely distant, transcends the individual’s complete grasp. Thus the mystic, in Murdoch’s system, is regarded as an ideal moral person, not because s/he is guided by God, but because of his/her selfless ability to attend to the world beyond oneself and intuit its moral and metaphysical truth. (shrink)

Is attention a cognitive process? I reconstruct and critically assess an argument first proposed by Christopher Mole that it cannot be so. Mole’s argument is influential because it creates theoretical space for a unifying analysis of attention at the subject level (though it does not entail it). Prominent philosophers working on attention such as Wayne Wu and Philipp Koralus explicitly endorse it, while Sebastian Watzl endorses a related version, this despite their differing theoretical commitments. I show that Mole’s argument is (...) invalid, amend it to secure its validity, but argue that it still fails. I consider the extent to which the failure of Mole’s argument spreads to the versions offered by Wu, Koralus and Watlz. Mole’s argument fails because it equivocates between the set of conditions that suffice for constituting attention and the subset of those conditions which are salient, but insufficient, for constituting it. Reflection on this distinction has consequences for the individuation not just of attentional processes but all cognitive processes. (shrink)

This is a study in thinking according to, but not withheld by, traditional methods from the branch of philosophy called Experiential Philosophy. Philosophers are interested in the topic of thought, if no one else. Yet, thinking is what we do sixteen hours a day. Or, as this study will show, thinking is what is done to us sixteen hours a day. What is thinking? Why is it? And, who is in charge here anyway? The following book will enter these questions (...) and make a serious attempt to keep deviations from target as small as possible. The thesis of this book is based on the recognition that thought is an activity in human beings that (1) proceeds in a fragmented way and that (2) basically cannot be halted. We cannot opt out of thinking. The conclusion is that this accounts for human suffering, lack of direction, and chaos in daily actions and decisions. This leads to the further conclusion that thinking is not something we do, it is something that is being done in us. (shrink)

The nature of attention has been the topic of a lively research programme in psychology for over a century. But there is widespread agreement that none of the theories on offer manage to fully capture the nature of attention. Recently, philosophers have become interested in the debate again after a prolonged period of neglect. This paper contributes to the project of explaining the nature of attention. It starts off by critically examining Christopher Mole’s prominent “adverbial” account of attention, which traces (...) the failure of extant psychological theories to their assumption that attending is a kind of process. It then defends an alternative, process-based view of the metaphysics of attention, on which attention is understood as an activity and not, as psychologists seem to implicitly assume, an accomplishment. The entrenched distinction between accomplishments and activities is shown to shed new light on the metaphysics of attention. It also provides a novel diagnosis of the empirical state of play. (shrink)

Jonardon Ganeri presents a radically reoriented account of mind, to which attention is the key. It is attention, not self, that explains the experiential and normative situatedness of humans in the world. Ganeri draws together three disciplines: analytic philosophy and phenomenology, cognitive science and psychology, and Buddhist thought.

This essay argues that current theories of action fail to explain agentive control because they have left out a psychological capacity central to control: attention. This makes it impossible to give a complete account of the mental antecedents that generate action. By investigating attention, and in particular the intention-attention nexus, we can characterize the functional role of intention in an illuminating way, explicate agentive control so that we have a uniform explanation of basic cases of causal deviance in action as (...) well as other defects of agency, explain cases of skilled agency and sharpen questions about the role of thought in agency. This provides for a different orientation in the theory of action. (shrink)

I argue first that attention is a (maybe the) paradigmatic case of an object-directed, non-propositional intentional mental episode. In addition attention cannot be reduced to any other (propositional or non-propositional) mental episodes. Yet, second, attention is not a non-propositional mental attitude. It might appear puzzling how one could hold both of these claims. I show how to combine them, and how that combination shows how propositionality and non-propositionality can co-exist in a mental life. The crucial move is one away from (...) an atomistic, building block picture to a more holistic, structural picture. (shrink)

: We provide empirical examples to conceptually clarify some items on Firestone & Scholl’s (F&S’s) checklist, and to explain perceptual effects from an attentional and memory perspective. We also note that action and embodied cognition studies seem to be most susceptible to misattributing attentional and memory effects as perceptual, and identify four characteristics unique to action studies and possibly responsible for misattributions.

Our paper serves as an introduction to a budding field: the philosophy of mind-wandering. We begin with a philosophical critique of the standard psychological definitions of mind-wandering as task-unrelated or stimulus-independent. Although these definitions have helped bring mind-wandering research onto centre stage in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, they have substantial limitations that researchers must overcome to move forward. Specifically, the standard definitions do not account for (i) the dynamics of mind wandering, (ii) task-unrelated thought that does not qualify as mind-wandering, (...) and (iii) the ways that mind-wandering can be task-related. We then survey three philosophical accounts that improve upon the current psychological definitions. We first present our account of mind-wandering as “unguided thinking”. Next we review Thomas Metzinger’s view that mind-wandering can be defined as thought lacking meta-awareness and cognitive agency, as well as Peter Carruthers’s and Fabian Dorsch’s definitions of mind-wandering as disunified thinking. We argue that these latter views are inadequate, and we show that our definition of mind-wandering as unguided thinking is not only conceptually and phenomenologically precise but also can be operationalized in a principled way for empirical research. (shrink)

Zenon Pylyshyn argues that cognitively driven attentional effects do not amount to cognitive penetration of early vision because such effects occur either before or after early vision. Critics object that in fact such effects occur at all levels of perceptual processing. We argue that Pylyshyn’s claim is correct—but not for the reason he emphasizes. Even if his critics are correct that attentional effects are not external to early vision, these effects do not satisfy Pylyshyn’s requirements that the effects be direct (...) and exhibit semantic coherence. In addition, we distinguish our defense from those found in recent work by Raftopoulos and by Firestone and Scholl, argue that attention should not be assimilated to expectation, and discuss alternative characterizations of cognitive penetrability, advocating a kind of pluralism. (shrink)

Wayne Wu argues that attention is necessary for action: since action requires a solution to the ‘Many–Many Problem’, and since only attention can solve the Many–Many Problem, attention is necessary for action. We question the first of these two steps and argue that it is based on an oversimplified distinction between actions and reflexes. We argue for a more complex typology of behaviours where one important category is action that does not require a solution to the Many–Many Problem, and so (...) does not require attention. (shrink)

In this thesis three independent answers to the question ‘what is attention?’ are provided. Each answer is a description of attention given through one of the perspectives that people have on the mental phenomenon. The first answer is the common-sense answer to the question, and is an account of the folk psychology of attention. The understanding of attention put forward here is of attention as a limited, divisible resource that is used in mental acts. The second answer is the empirical (...) answer to the question, and is an account of the metaphysics of attention. The understanding of attention put forward here is the account of attention proposed by Christopher Mole in his theory of attention as cognitive unison. The third answer is the experiential answer to the question, and is an account of the phenomenology of attention. The understanding of attention put forward here is of attention as a kind of directed mental effort. These three answers to the question are shown to be intimately related to each other, and to inform each other in important ways. They are also shown to be fundamentally different answers to each other with none being reducible to another, or more important than another. In the end, they will be found to be answers that arise from the differing perspectives that people are restricted to when considering the nature of mental phenomena, perspectives that must be recognised if an account of such phenomena is to be provided. (shrink)

I argued in Nanay 2010 that we cannot characterize perceptual content without reference to attention. Here, I defend this account from three objections raised by Jagnow 2011. This mainly takes the form of clarifying some details not sufficiently elaborated in the original article and dispelling some potential misunderstandings.

I argue that perceptual content is always affected by the allocation of one’s attention. Perception attributes determinable and determinate properties to the perceived scene. Attention makes (or tries to make) our perceptual attribution of properties more determinate. Hence, a change in our attention changes the determinacy of the properties attributed to the perceived scene.

This chapter argues that attention is a distinctive mode of consciousness, which plays an essential functional role in making information accessible for use in the rational control of thought and action. The main line of argument can be stated quite simply. Attention is what makes information fully accessible for use in the rational control of thought and action. But what makes information fully accessible for use in the rational control of thought and action is a distinctive mode of consciousness. Therefore, (...) attention is a distinctive mode of consciousness. In a slogan: attention is rational-access consciousness. (shrink)