In a recent paper, Christopher Mole (2008) argued in favour of the view that, according to our commonsense psychology, while consciousness is necessary for attention, attention isn’t necessary for consciousness. In this paper I offer an argument against this view. More precisely, I offer an argument against the claim that, according to our commonsense psychology, consciousness is necessary for attention. However, I don’t claim it follows from this argument that commonsense has it the other way around, viz. that consciousness isn’t (...) necessary for attention. Instead, I want to motivate the claim that there isn’t such a thing as the view of commonsense psychology about the relation between attention and consciousness. I argue that people’s use of these terms — and, presumably, of their corresponding concepts — seems to be context-dependent. I conclude with a discussion of the possible implications of this claim for the empirical study of attention and consciousness. (shrink)

Orthodox interpretations of Sperling‘s partial report paradigm support the idea that there is substantially more in our streams of consciousness than we can attend to or recall. I propose an alternative, postdictive interpretation which fails to support any such conclusion. This account is defended at greater length in my ‗Perception and iconic memory‘. Here I focus on the role ascribed to attention by the rival interpretations. I argue that orthodox accounts fail to assign a plausible role to attention. In contrast, (...) I suggest a novel way in which heterodox, postdictive account can assign attention a plausible role. We should therefore prefer such accounts over their orthodox rivals. Consequently, Sperling‘s paradigm fails to probe the true extent of conscious awareness unfettered by limitations on attention or memory. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch held that states of mind and character are of the first moral importance, and that attention to one's states of mind and character are a widespread source of moral failure. Maintaining both of these claims can lead to problems in the account of how one could become good. This paper explains the way in which Murdoch negotiated those problems, focusing, in particular on /The Sovereignty of Good/ and /The Nice and The Good/.

Does attention alter appearance? This critical issue, debated for over a century, remains unsettled. From psychophysical evidence that covert attention affects early vision-it enhances contrast sensitivity and spatial resolution-and from neurophysiological evidence that attention increases the neuronal contrast sensitivity (contrast gain), one could infer that attention changes stimulus appearance. Surprisingly, few studies have directly investigated this issue. Here we developed a psychophysical method to directly assess the phenomenological correlates of attention in humans. We show that attention alters appearance; it boosts (...) the apparent stimulus contrast. These behavioral results are consistent with neurophysiological findings suggesting that attention changes the strength of a stimulus by increasing its 'effective contrast' or salience. (shrink)

Attention only "recently"--i.e. in the eighteenth century--achieved chapter status in psychology textbooks in which psychology is conceived as a natural science. This report first sets this entrance, by sketching the historical contexts in which psychology has been considered to be a natural science. It then traces the construction of phenomenological descriptions of attention from antiquity to the seventeenth century, noting various aspects of attention that were marked for discussion by Aristotle, Lucretius, Augustine, and Descartes. The chapter goes on to compare (...) selected theoretical and empirical developments in the study of attention over three time slices: mid eighteenth century (C. Wolff, C. Bonnet, J. F. Abel), turn of the twentieth century (E. B. Titchener), and late twentieth century. Significant descriptive, theoretical, and empirical continuity emerges when these developments are considered in the large. This continuity is open to several interpretations, including the view that attention research shows long-term convergence because it is conditioned by the basic structure of attention as a natural phenomenon, and the less optimistic view that theory making in at least this area of psychology has been remarkably conservative when considered under large grain resolution, consisting in the reshuffling of a few core ideas. (shrink)

Can one pay attention to objects without being conscious of them? Some years ago there was evidence that had been taken to show that the answer is 'yes'. That evidence was inconclusive, but there is recent work that makes the case more compellingly: it now seems that it is indeed possible to pay attention to objects of which one is not conscious. This is bad news for theories in which the connection between attention and consciousness is taken to be an (...) essential one. It is good news for theories (including mine) in which the connection between attention and agency is taken to be essential. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give a new account of the way we exercise our attention in some paradigmatic cases of aesthetic experience. I treat aesthetic experience as a specific kind of experience and like in the case of other kinds of experiences, attention plays an important role in determining its phenomenal character. I argue that an important feature of at least some of our aesthetic experiences is that we exercise our attention in a specific, distributed, manner: our (...) attention is focused on one perceptual object, but it is distributed among the various properties of this object. I argue that this way of exercising one’s attention is very different from the way we attend most of the time and it fits very well with some important features of paradigmatic examples of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

This paper defends and develops the structuring account of conscious attention: attention is the conscious mental process of structuring one’s stream of consciousness so that some parts of it are more central than others. In the first part of the paper, I motivate the structuring account. Drawing on a variety of resources I argue that the phenomenology of attention cannot be fully captured in terms of how the world appears to the subject, as well as against an atomistic conception of (...) attention. In the second part of the paper, I show how the structuring account can be made precise: attention causes and causally sustains phenomenal relations to hold between the parts of the stream of consciousness; most importantly the relation of one part being peripheral to another. I end by pointing out consequences for both the scientific study of attention as well as for several areas of central philosophical interest. (shrink)

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)

Nineteen fifty-eight was an extraordinary year for cultural innovation, especially in English literature. It was also a year in which several boldly revisionary positions were first articulated in analytic philosophy. And it was a crucial year for the establishment of structural linguistics, of structuralist anthropology, and of cognitive psychology. Taken together these developments had a radical effect on our conceptions of individual creativity and of the inheritance of tradition. The present essay attempts to illuminate the relationships among these developments, and (...) to explain the foundational role played by mathematical, logical and information theory in all of them. (shrink)

A growing amount of media is paid for by its consumers through their very consumption of it. Typically, this new media is web-based and paid for by advertising. It includes the services offered by Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. We offer an ethical assessment of the attention economy, the market where attention is exchanged for new media. We argue that the assessment has ethical implications for how the attention economy should be regulated. To conduct the assessment, we employ two heuristics (...) for evaluating markets. One is the “harm” criterion, which relates to whether the market tends to engender extremely harmful outcomes for individuals or society as a whole. The other is the “agency” criterion, which relates not to the outcomes of the market, but rather, to whether it somehow reflects or has its source in weakened agency. We argue that the attention economy animates concerns with respect to both criteria and that new media should be subject to the same sort of regulation as other harmful, addictive products. (shrink)

This chapter analyzes aspects of the relationship between consciousness and intentionality. It focuses on the phenomenal character and the intentional content of perceptual states, canvassing various possible relations among them. It argues that there is a good case for a sort of representationalism, although this may not take the form that its advocates often suggest. By mapping out some of the landscape, the chapter tries to open up territory for different and promising forms of representationalism to be explored in the (...) future. In particular, it argues for a nonreductive, narrow, and Fregean variety of representationalism, which contrasts strongly with more widely explored varieties. It concludes with some words about the fundamental relationship between consciousness and intentionality. (shrink)

Reading the philosophical literature on consciousness, one might get the idea that there is just one problem in consciousness studies, the hard problem. That would be a mistake. There are other problems; some are more tractable, but none are easy, and all interesting. The literature on the hard problem gives the impression that we have made little progress. Consciousness is just an excuse to work and re-work familiar positions on the mind-body problem. But progress is being made elsewhere. Researchers are (...) moving towards increasingly specific accounts of the neural basis of conscious experience. These efforts will leave some questions unanswered, but they are no less significant for that. (shrink)

When performing a skilled action—whether something impressive like a double somersault or something mundane like reaching for a glass of water—you exercise control over your bodily movements. Specifically, you guide their course. In what does that control consist? In this dissertation, I argue that it consists in attending to what you are doing. More specifically, in attending, agents harness their perceptual and perceptuomotor states directly and practically in service of their goals and, in doing so, settle the fine-grained manner in (...) which their bodies will move—details an intention alone leaves unsettled. This requires, among other things, that we reject views on which agents’ control is identical with their practical rationality. When all goes well, agents attentionally prioritize what is motivationally relevant to them to the exclusion of what would otherwise distract them from achieving their goals. However, sometimes agents attend distractedly—i.e., without prioritizing. As the aim of attention is to avoid distraction, this entails the possibility of defective attention. Defective attention, in turn, casts light on scenarios in which agents lose control over what they are doing, as when a skilled practitioner ‘chokes under pressure’. A complaint sometimes levelled against accounts, like mine, that claim to reduce agents’ control of their behaviour to that of causally efficacious mental states or events is that these accounts invariably deprive agents themselves of their rightful role in the generation of behaviour. This is the “Disappearing Agent Problem” for “reductive” or “event-causal” theories of action. I argue that, correctly understood, extant reductive theories do face a genuine Disappearing Agent Problem. However, it is a problem we solve by recognizing the role that conscious attention plays in making an action the agent’s own. Accordingly, I develop and defend an attentional account of action ownership. On this view, allocating conscious attention in service of your goals is sufficient for a kind of conscious perspective (“motivational perspective”), which, when active in controlling your behaviour, constitutes the behaviour as your own doing. As I explain, such perspective also contributes to explaining the subjective structure of your perceptual awareness of the world around you. (shrink)

Scientific concepts are defined by metaphors. These metaphors determine what atten- tion is and what count as adequate explanations of the phenomenon. The authors analyze these metaphors within 3 types of attention theories: (a) --cause-- theories, in which attention is presumed to modulate information processing (e.g., attention as a spotlight; attention as a limited resource); (b) --effect-- theories, in which attention is considered to be a by-product of information processing (e.g., the competition meta- phor); and (c) hybrid theories that combine (...) cause and effect aspects (e.g., biased- competition models). The present analysis reveals the crucial role of metaphors in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and the efforts of scientists to find a resolution to the classic problem of cause versus effect interpretations. (shrink)

Evidence concerning the relationship between attention and multisensory integration has long been thought to lead us into a paradox. The paradox has its roots in evidence that seems to show that attention exerts an influence on integration, and that integration also exerts an influence on attention. This creates an appearance of paradox only if it is understood to imply that particular instances of the integration process must occur both before and after particular instances of the attention process. But this appearance (...) of paradox can be removed if we can find a way to resist the idea that there must be fixed temporal relations between the instances of these processes. That idea can seem hard to resist if both are understood to be processes of the sort that are brought to a halt by their own completion. Reflection on a metaphysical distinction between different sorts of process shows this understanding can be rejected. The appearance of paradox is thereby removed. (shrink)

I had intended this review not specifically as a criticism of Skinner's speculations regarding language, but rather as a more general critique of behaviorist (I would now prefer to say "empiricist") speculation as to the nature of higher mental processes. My reason for discussing Skinner's book in such detail was that it was the most careful and thoroughgoing presentation of such speculations, an evaluation that I feel is still accurate. Therefore, if the conclusions I attempted to substantiate in the review (...) are correct, as I believe they are, then Skinner's work can be regarded as, in effect, a reductio ad absurdum of behaviorist assumptions. My personal view is that it is a definite merit, not a defect, of Skinner's work that it can be used for this purpose, and it was for this reason that I tried to deal with it fairly exhaustively. I do not see how his proposals can be improved upon, aside from occasional details and oversights, within the framework of the general assumptions that he accepts. I do not, in other words, see any way in which his proposals can be substantially improved within the general framework of behaviorist or neobehaviorist, or, more generally, empiricist ideas that has dominated much of modern linguistics, psychology, and philosophy. The conclusion that I hoped to establish in the review, by discussing these speculations in their most explicit and detailed form, was that the general point of view was largely mythology, and that its widespread acceptance is not the result of empirical support, persuasive reasoning, or the absence of a plausible alternative. (shrink)

of presence cannot be explained by appeal to the notion of non-representational of experience. world see John Campbell, 'The Role of Physical Objects in Thinking', in Representation: Problems Perceptual Intentionality, and.

Chimpanzees follow the gaze of conspecifics and humans — follow it past distractors and behind barriers, ‘check back’ with humans when gaze following does not yield interesting sights, use gestures appropriately depending on the visual access of their recipient, and select different pieces of food depending on whether their competitor has visual access to them. Taken together, these findings make a strong case for the hypothesis that chimpanzees have some understanding of what other individuals can and cannot see. However, chimpanzees (...) do not seem nearly so skillful in the Gesture Choice and Object Choice experimental paradigms. Neither behavioral conditioning nor theory of mind explanations can account for these results satisfactorily. Instead this chapter proposes the idea that chimpanzees have the cognitive skills to recall, represent, categorize, and reason about the behavior and perception of others, but not their intentional or mental states, because they do not know that others have such states since they cannot make a link to their own. Human beings began their own evolutionary trajectory with these same skills, but then at some point in their evolution (probably quite recently) they began to understand that their own experience could serve as some kind of model for that of other persons. This allowed for even better prediction and control of the behavior of others and better communication and cooperation with them as well, and so it was an adaptation with immediate adaptive consequences that ensured its survival. (shrink)