The Epistemology of Attention

The author addresses the dialogue between Truth and Reality, suggesting that a Science of Consciousness, or Truth, be placed alongside a Science of Reality. He continues his exposition of Second Attention epistemology as set out in the previous article published on the ITJ’s zero issue. By defining concepts such as Transition from Zero, Egoic Syndrome of Identification, and Phenomenological Configuration of Disidentification, the Author lays down a number of guidelines to investigate the landscapes of consciousness with scientific methodology.

Social Virtue Epistemology

I motivate three claims: Firstly, attentional traits can be cognitive virtues and vices. Secondly, groups and collectives can possess attentional virtues and vices. Thirdly, attention has epistemic, moral, social, and political importance. An epistemology of attention is needed to better understand our social-epistemic landscape, including media, social media, search engines, political polarisation, and the aims of protest. I apply attentional normativity to undermine recent arguments for moral encroachment and to illuminate a distinctive epistemic value of occupying particular social positions. A recurring theme is that disproportionate attention can distort, mislead, and misrepresent even when all the relevant claims are true and well supported by evidence. In the informational cacophony of the internet age, epistemology must foreground the cognitive virtues of attunement.

Abstract: The object of Second Attention epistemology is to suggest an approach to the inner experience of states of consciousness that focuses on the subject of the experience and on the guarantee of validity of its claims. It establishes attention (mindfulness) as a new frontier and the ulterior mode as the instrument with which to investigate it. It postulates the ability to distinguish a first attention, born of the reactive mind and emotional identification, from a second attention, born of conscious observation and disidentification. It outlines a method of investigation and validation based on participatory dialogue between man and the environment that has its roots in the organismic Self, as well as psycho-physical content that may be standardized as a result of measuring it against phenomenologically accessible reference maps. It brings together, just to name a few, Hartelius’ Quantitative Somatic Phenomenology, Varela’s First-person methodology, as well as Tart and Wilber’s State-specific science in a bid to set standards for a science of consciousness.

Blockheads!, 2019

Mind

The nineteenth century saw the development of reductive views of attention. The German philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf (1848-1936) proposed an original reductive view according to which attention is nothing but interest and interest itself is a positive feeling. Stumpf’s view was developed by Francis Bradley (1846-1924), George Frederick Stout (1860-1944), and Josiah Royce (1855-1916), but has been overlooked in the recent literature. In this paper, I will expound Stumpf’s view of attention, trace it back to its Aristotelian roots and defend the version offered by Stout and Royce. In this version a new kind of feeling, feelings of interest, and value, intellectual value, take centre stage.

This paper considers 2 basic paradigms of attention: one in which attention constitutes a focusing or a narrowing of perception which reveals the nature of objects in greater profundity by shining a light upon them, and a second Bergsonian (and Kaprowian, after Allan Kaprow) paradigm where attention is conceived as a practice of immanent thought. The crisis of attention in the former paradigm is the distraction of that gaze when it hops from one discrete thing to another, or the diffusion of that light over too many different things at once – what the informational paradigm might call skimming and multi-tasking respectively. Here, to enhance attention or to save it from its current degraded form - means to shine more light on a thing, to make a conscious decision to think harder about it, to look at it more closely. By contrast, in the Kaprow/Bergson paradigm, attention is a thing in itself (rather than a mere effect of the sum of human discourses) but understood as a process rather than a static object. In turn, the solution here to the crisis of attentiveness is not a question of bringing more power of attention or perception (more consciousness, more representation) to the thing, but ironically less of these representationalist elements: less selection and more a kind of immersion in the object understood as a process, less conscious effort and more an immanent mode of thought forced upon us by the thing itself. Bergson defines the philosophical practice of ‘intuition’ as a reversal of the direction of thought: philosophy moving in the opposite direction from its usual trajectory. Concepts don’t come from us and project themselves on to the object here, but move in the other direction from the object to us – the attended is attending us, the object is thinking us. This is the nature of an expanded perception or an attention without the blinders that restrict it in consciousness. Attention is not about a decision to think harder, look harder about x; rather attention occurs when an unexpected y forces us to think anew.

Journal of Philosophical Research

A central aim of Sandy Goldberg’s project is to defend a fundamentally epistemic source of normative conversational pressure—one which does not reduce to the interpersonal dimension. A second core aim is to provide an explanation of how expectations are generated by the performances within a conversation. This essay raises several challenges for chapter 2 of his book, ‘Your Attention Please!.’ From various angles, the essay challenges the central idea of that chapter: namely, that by the act of address, a speaker generates an obligation for a hearer to attend to the speaker.

2010

This dissertation investigates the nature, the phenomenal character and the philosophical significance of attention. According to its central thesis, attention is the ongoing mental activity of structuring the stream of consciousness or phenomenal field. The dissertation connects the scientific study of attention in psychology and the neurosciences with central discussions in the philosophy of mind. Once we get clear on the nature and the phenomenal character of attention, we can make progress toward understanding foundational issues concerning the nature and the structure of conscious mentality itself. We understand better how consciousness is connected to self-awareness and to agency, and we get a better grip on the nature of perceptual experience, the unity of consciousness, and its subjective character. The dissertation also aims at showing that the current empirical investigation of attention should be complemented with work at the level of generality that a philosophical analysis can provide; it shows how such an analysis is relevant for the scientific study of attention by providing a new conceptual framework and suggesting several new areas of research. i 1! The simplified scenario____________________________________________ 41! 2! Deflationary relationism ___________________________________________ 44! 3! Simple relationism _______________________________________________ 48! 3.1! Objects _____________________________________________________ 51! 3.2! Determinacy_________________________________________________ 54! 3.3! Foreground__________________________________________________ 57! 3.4! Prominence _________________________________________________ 59! 4! Impure relationism _______________________________________________ 63! 5! Reflexive relationism _____________________________________________ 68! 5.1! The view____________________________________________________ 68! ii 5.2! Characteristics _______________________________________________ 70! 5.3! Computational underpinnings ___________________________________ 74! 6! Summary and Outlook ____________________________________________ 77! 2 Attention as a Mental Activity ______________________________ 78! 1! A puzzle about perception _________________________________________ 80! 2! Activities and intentional actions ____________________________________ 84! 3! The temporal shape of activities _____________________________________ 89! 3.1! The linguistics of aspect________________________________________ 89! 3.2! From the linguistics of aspect to the metaphysics of temporal shape _____ 92! 3.3! Attending has the temporal shape of an activity _____________________ 97! 3.4! Activities in the weakest sense _________________________________ 102! 3.5! Activities in the weak sense____________________________________ 103! 4! The causal structure of activities____________________________________ 105! 4.1! Dretske on the causal structure of processes _______________________ 105! 4.2! Activities in the strong sense ___________________________________ 107! 5! Ways of attending _______________________________________________ 110! 5.1! The puzzle about perception solved (preliminarily) _________________ 110! 5.2! Ways of attending defined _____________________________________ 114! 6! Consequences __________________________________________________ 116! 6.1! Reflexive awareness is activity-awareness ________________________ 116! 6.2! Enacting perception: the better way______________________________ 119! 6.3! Explaining extramission beliefs_________________________________ 121! 7! Summary and Outlook ___________________________________________ 124! 3 Attention as Structuring of the Stream of Consciousness _______ 125! 1! The components of structuralism ___________________________________ 126! 1.1! The freedom component ______________________________________ 130! 1.2! The structure component ______________________________________ 133! 2! Precursors _____________________________________________________ 140! 3! Structuralism made precise ________________________________________ 144! iii 3.1! Basic ideas _________________________________________________ 144! 3.2! Attentional space (part 1)______________________________________ 148! 3.3! Attentional space (part 2)______________________________________ 152! 3.4! Neural underpinnings_________________________________________ 154! 3.5! Is attentional structure diaphanous?______________________________ 155! 3.6! Preview on the dynamics of attention ____________________________ 157! 4! Consequences __________________________________________________ 160! 4.1! A unified and holistic science of attention_________________________ 160! 4.2! Phenomenal entanglement _____________________________________ 161! 4.3! Structures of consciousness ____________________________________ 163! 4.4! Mental management__________________________________________ 164! 5! Summary and Outlook ___________________________________________ 165! 4 The Dynamics of Attention________________________________ 167! 1! The sub-personal account _________________________________________ 170! 2! The salience account _____________________________________________ 175! 2.1! The general idea_____________________________________________ 175! 2.2! Scientific evidence ___________________________________________ 177! 2.3! Encounters of salience: a preliminary analysis _____________________ 181! 2.4! The deflationary account of encounters of salience__________________ 184! 3! The experiential account of encounters of salience: salientishness _________ 186! 4! Constraints on salientishness ______________________________________ 190! 4.1! Salientishness comes in degrees ________________________________ 190! 4.2! Salientishness drives attention essentially _________________________ 190! 4.3! Salientishness implies no queer properties ________________________ 191! 4.4! Salientishness has no normative impact __________________________ 194! 4.5! Salientishness does not depend on any mind-to-world attitude_________ 196! 5! Salientishness as experiential potential_______________________________ 197! 5.1! The view___________________________________________________ 197! 5.2! Unifying voluntary and involuntary attention ______________________ 201! 5.3! Computational and neuronal underpinnings _______________________ 203! iv 6! Consequences __________________________________________________ 205! 6.1! The flux of attention__________________________________________ 205! 6.2! Intuitive reasoning ___________________________________________ 206! 6.3! Coordination problems________________________________________ 208! 6.4! Language and communication __________________________________ 210! 7! Summary and Outlook ___________________________________________ 211! 5 Attention and the Particularity of Consciousness _____________ 212! 1! Particularist relationism __________________________________________ 213! 2! Preliminaries ___________________________________________________ 218! 3! The attention argument ___________________________________________ 224! 4! In defense of attentional relationism_________________________________ 231! 4.1! Some intuitive considerations __________________________________ 231! 4.2! The argument from demonstrative reference_______________________ 233! 4.3! The explanation argument _____________________________________ 235! 4.4! Transition __________________________________________________ 238! 5! The hallucination argument against attentional relationism _______________ 239! 6! The smooth transition argument ____________________________________ 242! 6.1! The basic idea ______________________________________________ 242! 6.2! The argument _______________________________________________ 243! 6.3! Specific resistances at individual steps of the argument ______________ 248! 6.4! General resistances against the argument _________________________ 255! 7! An implementation and generalizations ______________________________ 259! 7.1! The natural implementation of particularist relationism ______________ 259! 7.2! Tentative generalizations to other forms of experience_______________ 264! 8! Summary and Outlook ___________________________________________ 266! 6 The Attentional Basis of Consciousness _____________________ 268! 1! Structuralism and the unity of consciousness __________________________ 268! 1.1! The phenomenal unity of consciousness __________________________ 268! 1.2! Sufficiency _________________________________________________ 272! v 1.3! Necessity __________________________________________________ 276! 1.4! Attention and split-brains______________________________________ 279! 1.5! The attention account of unity __________________________________ 288! 2! Is there consciousness outside attention? _____________________________ 289! 2.1! The possible centrality of all conscious events _____________________ 290! 2.2! The connectedness of all conscious events ________________________ 293! 2.3! The necessity of phenomenal unity ______________________________ 294! 2.4! Hemineglect ________________________________________________ 294! 2.5! Balint's syndrome ___________________________________________ 299! 2.6! Split-brains again ____________________________________________ 301! 3! Attention and the subjective character of consciousness _________________ 302! 3.1! Do all (possible) subjects always attend to something? ______________ 302! 3.2! Reflexive awareness and the subjective character of consciousness _____ 304! 4! Conclusion: the attentional basis of consciousness _____________________ 311! Appendix__________________________________________________ 315! Appendix 1: Experiments concerning attention without consciousness_________ 315! Appendix 2: Representationalism and spatial foreground ___________________ 323! Appendix 3: Alternative versions of particularist relationism ________________ 328! The Sensibilia View ______________________________________________ 329!...

This paper focuses on introspection of perceptual consciousness and attempts to draw on empirical work on attention to provide a psychologically realistic model of introspection that is then used to explain certain properties of introspection. A key issue concerns unpacking introspective reliability. I claim that we can fix conditions of introspective reliability as rigorously as any experimental condition in cognitive science. Worries about the use of introspection in philosophy are raised: it is far less rigorous than it needs to be.

Global Philosophy

The “attention economy” refers to the tech industry’s business model that treats human attention as a commodifiable resource. The libertarian critique of this model, dominant within tech and philosophical communities, claims that the persuasive technologies of the attention economy infringe on the individual user’s autonomy and therefore the proposed solutions focus on safeguarding personal freedom through expanding individual control. While this push back is important, current societal debates on the ethics of persuasive technologies are informed by a particular understanding of attention, rarely posited explicitly yet assumed as the default. They share the same concept of attention, namely an individualistic and descriptive concept of attention that is a cognitive process, an expendable resource, something that one should control individually. We step away from a negative analysis in terms of external distractions and aim for positive answers, turning to Buddhist ethics to formula...

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2020

In recent years, a significant body of literature has emerged on the subject of epistemic injustice: wrongful harms done to people in their capacities as knowers (Fricker 2007). Up to now this literature has ignored the role that attention has to play in epistemic injustice. This paper makes a first step towards addressing this gap. We argue that giving someone less attention than they are due, which we call an epistemic attention deficit, is a distinct form of epistemic injustice. We begin by outlining what we mean by epistemic attention deficits, which we understand as a failure to pay someone the attention they are due in their role as an epistemic agent. We argue that these deficits constitute epistemic injustices for two reasons. First, they affect someone’s ability to influence what others believe. Second, they affect one’s ability to influence the shared common ground in which testimonial exchanges take place. We then outline the various ways in which epistemic attention defi...

Effortless Attention: A New Perspective in the Cognitive Science of Attention and Action, 2010

In this Introduction, I identify seven discrete aspects of attention brought to the fore by by considering the phenomenon of effortless attention: effort, decision-making, action syntax, agency, automaticity, expertise, and mental training. For each, I provide an overview of recent research, identify challenges to or gaps in current attention theory with respect to it, consider how attention theory can be advanced by including current research, and explain how relevant chapters of this volume offer such advances.

This essay explores visual rhetorics, or images as material, causal bodies through Gilbert Simondon's notion of transindividuation and the same of Bernard Stiegler in "Taking Care of Youth and the Generations".

2007

In the introduction to the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau‑Ponty (2002: 34) states that ‘Attention, […] as a general and formal activity, does not exist’. This paper examines the meaning and truth of this surprising statement, along with its implications for the account of perception given by theorists such as Dretske (1988) and Peacocke (1983). In order to elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of perception, I present two alternative models of how attention might be thought to operate. The first is derived from the works of the aforementioned theorists and is, I argue, based upon a largely inaccurate computational or mechanistic understanding of the mind. The second is drawn from the works of Merleau-Ponty and Alva Noë, and takes into account recent neurological theories concerning the role of attention in human consciousness. On the basis of these models I argue that attention is an essential, rather than incidental, characteristic of consciousness that is constitutive of both thought and perception, and which cannot be understood in terms of the independent faculty or ‘general and unconditioned power’ (ibid. 31) that Dretske et al’s account requires. I conclude by considering two potential counterexamples to my argument, and evaluating the threat that these pose to the phenomenological model.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2014