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Perceptual content is indexed to attention

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Abstract

Attention seems to raise a problem for pure representationalism, the view that phenomenal content supervenes on representational content. The problem is that shifts of attention sometimes seem to bring about a change in phenomenal content without a change in representational content. I argue that the representationalist can meet this challenge, but that doing so requires a new view of the representational content of perception. On this new view, the representational content of perception is always relative to a way of attending. I call this the attention-indexed view of perceptual content.

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Notes

  1. For a preliminary discussion of this view, see Prettyman (2011) Shifts of Attention and the Content of Perception and Watzl (forthcoming).

  2. There are many variants of pure representationalism. Some pure representationalists hold that having a particular phenomenal content just is having a particular representational content. Others permit a distinction between phenomenal content and representational content, but maintain that representational content exhaustively determines phenomenal content (Chalmers 2004). These distinctions among different pure representationalist views won’t make a difference to my arguments in this paper. Impure representationalism, in contrast, allows that phenomenal content might supervene on more than just representational content, like the mode of presentation. For the purposes of this paper, when I use the term ‘representationalism’ I mean pure representationalism, unless otherwise specified.

  3. A third option is to defend a version of impure representationalism. Ganson and Bronner (2013) have explored one version of impure representationalism which they call quasi-representationalism. A quasi-representationalist accounts for the effect of attention on appearance by introducing the notion of prominence. Prominence is a representational fact, but it is not a fact about representational content. My goal in this paper is to give an account of phenomenal change due to attention in terms of representational content, so I will not address their argument here.

  4. Block agrees that there are many ways of correctly representing the Gabor patch, but he means something different than what I mean. On Block’s view, in order for two distinct representational contents of an objectively 22 % patch to be veridical, the representational content on both occasions must include the actual contrast: 22 %. On my view, distinct and contradictory contrast amounts can be veridical. The 22 % patch could be accurately represented by 28 %-attended and 22 %-unattended, for example.

  5. This example originates in Watzl (2013), though he uses it to illustrate a different point.

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Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to Evan Thompson, whose support has been invaluable in developing the views in this paper. I would additionally like to thank the anonymous reviewers, as well as Ned Block, Kevin Connolly, Carolyn Dicey-Jennings, Todd Ganson, Benj Hellie, Mohan Matthen, and Bill Seager, whose comments and discussion were immensely helpful. I am indebted to the audiences at the 2011 Harvard-MIT graduate philosophy conference, the 2011 NYU-Columbia graduate philosophy conference, the 2011 Pacific APA, the 2011 Eastern APA, the 2011 Interdisciplinary Conference on Consciousness at Boston University, and the 2012 Yale-UConn graduate conference. I owe special thanks to those people who served as commenters: Alex Bryne, Anya Farennikova, Bill Fish, Nemira Gasiunas, Aaron Norby, and Sebastian Watzl.

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  1. Bryn Mawr College, 101 N. Merion Ave, Bryn Mawr, PA, 19010, USA

    Adrienne Prettyman

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  1. Adrienne Prettyman
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Correspondence to Adrienne Prettyman.

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Prettyman, A. Perceptual content is indexed to attention. Synthese 194, 4039–4054 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1125-x

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