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Is attention a non-propositional attitude?
Sebastian Watzl
Introduction
Attention is a central aspect of mental life. But even basic aspects of its nature remain
poorly understood. We do not even know what general kind of entity attention is.1 In
this essay, my goal is to make progress by considering the following hypothesis.
The Non-Propositional Attitude Hypothesis
propositional, intentional mental attitude.
Attention is an irreducibly non-
According to the NPA hypothesis, attending to something, focusing one’s attention
on something, or having one’s attention captured by something are to be understood
as having roughly the same general form as fearing something or thinking about
something. Attention would be an intentional attitude that is normally directed at
something other than a proposition, and cannot be reductively explained in terms of
propositional attitudes. The NPA hypothesis deserves to be taken seriously. Attending
to something at least seems to have the same structure as, for example, thinking about
something. It seems to have the structure of a non-propositional attitude.
Investigating the NPA hypothesis promises to elucidate the nature of attention. In
addition, it promises to contribute insights regarding the following three topics.
First, consider intentionalism, the view that all mental phenomena either are or are
reducible to intentional phenomena.2 Given that attention seems to be a mental
phenomenon, intentionalism predicts that attention is an intentional phenomenon. The
NPA hypothesis would be one option – arguably the most straightforward option –
for how intentionalism might treat attention. Can it be treated in that way?
Second, consider propositionalism, the view that all intentional phenomena either are
or are reducible to propositional attitudes. Propositionalism has recently been
criticized: some intentional states, it has been argued, are irreducibly object-directed
rather than propositional (e.g. fearing something, liking or loving someone, or
thinking about something).3 The case against propositionalism remains controversial.4
If the NPA hypothesis can be substantiated, then opponents of propositionalism can
1
Doubts have been raised as to whether it is an entity at all. See Mole (2011).
2
E.g. Crane 1998.
3
E.g. Montague 2007, Grzankowski 2012,2013; or Crane 2014.
4
See Sinhababu 2014 for a recent defense of propositionalism against the arguments by the authors
mentioned in Fn. 4. Sinhababu does not discuss attention.
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add appeal to attention. Defenders of propositionalism, by contrast, need to show that
the NPA hypothesis is false.
Third, consider the attitudinal building block model, the view that a comprehensive
account of an individual’s mental life at any given time can be given by listing all of
her intentional attitudes. This model is one way to make intentionalism more precise:
there is nothing more to an individual’s mentality than her intentional attitudes.
Intentional attitudes are the building blocks of mentality. If the NPA hypothesis is
true, is attention a basic non-propositional building block or can it be constructed out
of other non-propositional building blocks (such as thought about something)? If the
NPA hypothesis is false, can the attitudinal building block model be defended by
constructing attention out of other intentional building blocks?
This paper has three aims. First, I will argue that attention is indeed an intentional
phenomenon. In one form intentionalism is safe from attention. Second, I will argue
that attention neither is a propositional attitude nor can be reduced to a propositional
attitude. Opponents of propositionalism thus may appeal to attention to strengthen
their case. Third, I will argue that attention does not fit the building block model. The
intentional mind has more structure than that model allows. The sense in which
intentionalism is true is not the sense of the building block model.
On the view I will suggest, the NPA hypothesis is partially true and partially false.
Attention is intentional and non-propositional. But most fundamentally it is not a
mental attitude. Attention is a non-propositional structure of the intentional mind.
1
Preliminaries
Some may be surprised to see attention discussed on such a level of abstraction – in
roughly the same way as many philosophers have discussed perception, thought, fear,
hope and desire. The intellectual climate has long treated attention as a topic for
neuroscientific and psychological study, and not as a topic that might be better
understood by also drawing on philosophical tools.
But it is unclear why attention should be treated differently than those other aspects of
mentality. If we can make progress toward understanding them by asking whether
they are non-propositional attitudes (or other questions at the same level of
abstraction), it would be surprising if the relevant philosophical tools became
toothless when applied to attention. Attention is similar to phenomena like
perception, thought, or desire at least in the following four ways.
First, attention is an important aspect of what is often called folk-psychology: an
important aspect of how we experience, think and talk about the minds of others.
Already infants are extremely sensitive to whether their caregivers pay attention to
them, and react differentially to attentive engagement. “The attention of others,”
suggests developmental psychologist Vasu Reddy (2008, p. 90), “is probably the first,
simplest, and most powerful experience that we have of mentality.” And according to
Is attention a non-propositional attitude?
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Susan Carey, a rudimentary conception of attention may indeed be a part of innate
core knowledge regarding mentality, at least developmentally more fundamental than
conceptions of belief or desire.5
Second, attention is also an important aspect of the intuitive conception we have of
our own mentality. As William James (1890/1981, p. 424) famously put it: “Every
one knows what attention is. … Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of
its essence.” Attention is an important aspect of our conscious experience: there often
is something it is like to focus attention on something. We thus know something
about attention in roughly the same way we know about pain or desire, by
phenomenological reflection on our own experience. Whether or not attention is
essentially conscious, we get some initial grip on the phenomenon from the way it
shapes our experience.6
Third, attention is an “inner” form of mentality just like perception, thought or desire.
While attention – like the latter – sometimes has a bodily expression, often we deploy
attention without such an overt expression.7 A subject may focus her attention on one
instrument in an orchestra or on one aspect of the music without any overt bodily
signs. The same is true for visual attention. We may shift attention to something
without a movement of the eyeball,8 and we may focus attention on one feature (like
color) rather than another (like shape) without a difference in bodily posture.
Fourth, just like the nature of desire or belief is unlikely to be found in a specific
aspect of neuronal or computational processing, the nature of attention can probably
not be found on that level either. On the level of such processing we find a diverse
variety of properties and processes and not a unified neuronal or computational
property or process with which attention could be reductively identified in a direct
and straightforward fashion. Attention – like perception, thought or desire – thus
appears to be a personal level mental phenomenon, without a straightforward
reductive explanation.9
Attention thus is characterized by the following features. It is part of folk-psychology,
an aspect of conscious experience, intuitively “inner”, and without an easy reductive
explanation. While a detailed defense these claims about attention would need more
space than this paper allows, our initial presumption should thus be that attention is
5
Carey 2010, Ch. 5, p. 157ff
6
Recent evidence strongly suggests that attention is not essentially conscious. See Kentridge (2011)
for a fairly recent overview.
7
Psychologists routinely distinguish between overt (i.e. bodily expressed) forms of attention, and
covert forms of attention (see e.g. Wright and Ward 2008 for a review).
8
9
Wright and Ward 2008 for a detailed review of covert visual attention shifts.
See Watzl (forthcoming). Note that I do not claim that attention has no reductive explanation. I am
only claiming that any reductive explanation of attention is likely to be as complex as a reductive
explanation of perception, thought or desire. Skepticism toward an understanding of mentality in such
terms as “content”, “attitude”, or “intentionality” should not be directed to attention alone.
Is attention a non-propositional attitude?
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enough like perception, belief, fear, hope and desire so that we can ask some of the
same questions about attention that many philosophers have asked about those other
aspects of mentality. What kind mental phenomenon is attention? In particular, is the
NPA hypothesis true, i.e. is attention a non-propositional mental attitude?
2
Types of Attention
Attention comes in a variety of different forms. Here is a partial (though fairly
extensive) list.
Focusing attention
(1)
Adam focused his attention on the red spot on the wall.
Paying Attention
(2)
Berta always pays attention to what others say about her.
Directing attention
(3a) Caleb directed his attention to his breathing.
(3b) Delilah directed her attention to the issues raised by her supervisor’s
comments.
Capturing/Catching attention
(4a) Eric’s attention was captured by the explosion outside.
(4b) Fatima’s attention was caught by a stinging pain in her left foot.
Occupying attention
(5a) George’s attention was occupied by his thoughts about his next vacation.
(5b) Helga’s attention – by contrast – was occupied with more important matters.
Attentiv(ely)
(6a) Ilija observed the scene attentively.
(6b) Juliet played basketball attentively.10
10
The word “attention” also occurs in phrases of the forms “To draw, direct or call (someone’s)
attention to something” or “something or someone gets, receives, gains, demands or seeks attention
(from someone)” or “to shift or redirect attention from one thing to another thing”. I will not consider
those here and take for granted that the phenomena they denote are explanatorily posterior to the ones I
focus on here.
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I suggest that we group these phenomena into three classes.
First, there is paying attention, focusing attention and directing attention. Arguably,
these are linguistic variants depicting fundamentally the same phenomenon (and
hence we can substitute one for the other in the examples (1)-(3)). All of them
describe a certain type of mental activity: the subject is described as doing something
that may go on for a certain period of time. In what follows I will ignore any subtle
differences between focusing, directing and paying attention and assume that these
amount to fundamentally the same phenomenon. I will simply speak of attending to
something. Among cases of attending to something we can distinguish perceptual
forms that engage the subject’s perceptual capacities – as in (1) – and intellectual
forms that engage her cognitive capacities – as in (3b). Some cases – such as (2) and
(3b) – seem to be neither clearly perceptual nor clearly cognitive. I will start by
focusing on perceptual cases (because they have been investigated in more detail).
The view I will end up with, though, applies to both perceptual and intellectual cases.
Second, there is having one’s attention captured or caught by something. Attention
capture, in contrast to attending to something, happens at a time, and the subject does
not seem to be actively involved. Like attending to something, attention capture is
paradigmatically perceptual and directed at an external object (though, as in (4b), a
subject’s attention may also be captured by a bodily sensation). The relationship
between attention capture and attending is not entirely straightforward. One option is
to think of attention capture as the passive acquisition of a certain state, and of
attending as the activity of maintaining that state.11
Third, there is attention being occupied by something and performing an activity
attentively. While attention capture and attending are paradigmatically directed at
external objects, what occupies attention are the subject’s own mental and bodily
activities: to say that a subject’s attention is occupied by certain ideas or views or
subject matters, as in (5b), arguably just is to say that to her attention is occupied by
thinking about these ideas, views or subject matters. Plausibly, talk of an activity as
occupying the subject’s attention and talk of her performing that activity attentively
again are linguistic variants of each other. To say that Ilija observed the scene
attentively just is to say that his attention was occupied by observing the scene. And
to say that Juliet played basketball attentively just is to say that the activity of playing
basketball occupied her attention.
We thus have three types of attention: attending to something, attention capture and
occupying attention. We should not assume these three types of attention can be
reduced to a single most fundamental one. They might be three distinct aspects of our
mental life that should receive distinct treatment. And indeed many psychologists
11
This is idea is inspired by Soteriou’s treatment of noticing and watching (Soteriou 2012). Noticing is
closely related to attention capture. But, arguably, it is not the same. We may notice something even
though it does not capture our attention: I noticed the grey sky yesterday, and hence I know that the
sky was grey yesterday, but given how ordinary grey skies are at this time of the year, the grey sky did
not capture my attention.
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distinguish endogenous attention (a certain type of internally controlled mental
activity), exogenous attention (stimulus controlled attention capture) and central or
executive attention (the attention engaged by the performance of a certain task). In
what follows I will focus on attending and attention capture and provide a unified
treatment. The NPA hypothesis has initial plausibility only for those two phenomena
(it is unclear how to treat playing basketball attentively in terms of a nonpropositional attitude). I will set aside executive attention and leave open whether it
in turn can be unified with endogenous and exogenous attention. In what follows I
will thus use “attention” to mean attending to something or having one’s attention
caught by something.
3
Is Attention an Intentional Phenomenon?
Let us first ask whether attention is an intentional phenomenon.
The concept of intentionality is often introduced with reference to Brentano’s idea of
“the mind’s direction toward an object”,12 or his idea that certain mental phenomena
are such that they include “something as an object within itself.”13 Call this the
intuitive conception of intentionality. In order to give the reader a grip on the idea of
intentionality a number of paradigms are often introduced such as thinking about
something, desiring something, looking at something or listening to something.
The attentional phenomena are included within those paradigms: directing attention to
something or having one’s attention captured by something are paradigms of the idea
that the mind is directed toward an object or includes an object (the object of
attention) within itself. “Attending and perceiving are […] paradigmatic intentional
relations”, Susan Carey (2011, p. 158), for example, observes. It is thus hard to think
of an argument for why attention should be understood as an intentional
phenomenon, when intentionality is conceived of by reference to Brentano’s idea.
Attention seems to be part of a range of phenomena that help to fix the referent of the
technical notion of intentionality.
Consider also the phenomenological observation according to which those with a
mental life have a perspective or point of view on the world and hence have
intentionality. Call this the phenomenological conception of intentionality.14 Here is
how Tim Crane (2001) expresses this idea.
What the daffodil lacks and the ‘minded’ creature has is a point of
view on things or […] a perspective. We might express this by saying
that a minded creature is one which has a world: its world.
12
Brentano 2014
13
Ibid.
14
Crane 1998.
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Attention is intimately connected to the idea of a point of view or perspective on the
world. By describing how a subject attends we seem to describe the subject’s
perspective or point of view. In William James’s (1890/1981, p. 424) words: “each of
us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of a universe he
shall appear to himself to inhabit.” Consider, for example, how intuitive it is to think
about differences in attention when we think about differences in subjective
perspectives. In her popular science book ‘The Philosophical Baby’ (2010)
developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik illustrates what she thinks of as crucial
differences in the subjective perspectives between babies and adults by describing
differences in the ways they attend. While the perspective of adults is often narrow
and focused (their attention takes the form of a narrow spotlight), the perspective of
babies is wide and open (their attention is distributed and takes the form of a lantern
that illuminates everything at once). Attention thus seems clearly intentional also in
the sense that is intimately connected to having a subjective perspective or point of
view on the world.
Finally, consider that intentional states are often thought to play a distinctive role in
the explanation of agency. A person’s intentional states are those states that explain
her actions in a rational or sense-making way. Call this the pragmatic conception of
intentionality. Robert Stalnaker (1984) expresses the view as follows.
Representational [= intentional]15 mental states should be understood
primarily in terms of the role that they play in the characterization and
explanation of action. What is essential to rational action is that the
agent be confronted, or conceive of himself as confronted, with a
range of alternative possible outcomes of some alternative possible
actions. The agent has attitudes, pro and con, toward the different
possible outcomes, and beliefs about the contribution which the
alternative actions would make to determining the outcome. One
explains why an agent tends to act in the way he does in terms of such
beliefs and attitudes. And, according to this picture, our conceptions of
belief and of attitudes pro and con are conceptions of states which
explain why a rational agent does what he does. Some representational
mental states—for example, idle wishes, passive hopes, and theoretical
beliefs—may be connected only very indirectly with action, but all
must be explained, according to the pragmatic picture, in terms of their
connections with the explanation of rational action.
Does attention play a role in the characterization and explanation of rational action?
In a recent series of writings Wayne Wu (2008, 2011a,b) has argued that it does. The
rough idea is that a situated agent is normally confronted with many perceptual inputs
and many possible behavioral outputs. Wu calls this the Many-Many problem.
Intentional action, Wu writes, “requires a solution to the Many-Many Problem by
15
Stalnaker (p. 2) explicitly identifies representational and intentional states.
Is attention a non-propositional attitude?
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selection of a specific linkage between input and output” (2008, p. 50). He then
argues that perceptual attention plays a crucial role in that selection by prioritizing or
selecting some aspects of the perceptually represented situation over others. Without
attention, according to Wu, agents could not solve the many-many problem. Since
solving the many-many problem is essential to intentional agency, attention is
essential to intentional agency (this is so exactly because intentional agents conceive
of themselves as being confronted with a range of possible actions in light of how
they take the world to be; cf. Stalnaker, op. cit.). Neither her standing beliefs and
desires, her long-term intentions, and her perceptual experience will be enough to
determine a specific action in her concrete situation. In many cases at least, the agents
needs to prioritize some aspects of what she is confronted with over others. And this
is exactly what attention delivers.16
Attention thus seems to be intentional on both the intuitive, the phenomenological as
well as on the pragmatic conception of intentionality. It is hard to deny that attention
is an intentional phenomenon.
4
Attention does not seem to be a propositional attitude
Both attending as well as attention capture are ascribed by relational predicates. We
can focus attention on, and have our attention captured by, a variety of different
entities. These include the following.17
•
Material objects: “attending to this glass.”
•
Locations in the environment or on the body: “attending to this location.”
•
Events: “attending to this sound or this flash.”
•
Processes: “attending to the leaves’ rustling, on the light’s flickering.”
•
Properties/Features/Qualities: “attending to the color, or the shape.”18
16
Jennings and Nanay (2014) provide an argument to the effect that some (non-paradigmatic) forms of
agency might not require attention. This targets Wu’s claim that attention is essential to agency. It does
not target the present claim. To be an intentional phenomenon, according to the pragmatic picture, does
not require that the relevant phenomenon is essential to all actions (emotion, perception or even
conscious thought are not involved in all actions either). The picture only requires that an intentional
phenomenon is essentially involved in a rationalizing explanation of some (or maybe a large and
important enough class of) intentional actions.
17
I provide examples of attending to something. Most of these work for attention capture as well
(though, interestingly, while it seems that we can focus attention on a location, it seems that locations
cannot capture our attention). Note also that while I here introduce these examples intuitively,
examples like these can be found in any textbook on attention (e.g. Wright and Ward 2008).
18
Everyday examples thus illustrate that subjects often perceptually attend to properties. A subject
may, for example, focus her attention on the red color of her sofa. Property directed attention is also
Is attention a non-propositional attitude?
•
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Facts: “attending to the fact that this is red/square/absent.” “His attention was
caught by the fact that this is red/square/absent.”
None of the attentional constructions take that-clauses:19
(*7a)
She focuses attention on that p.
(*7b)
She directs attention to that p.
(*7c)
She pays attention to that p.
(*7d)
Her attention was captured by that p.
The attentional constructions thus do not appear to be propositional attitude
constructions. Note also that attention to locations, objects, events, etc. cannot be
reduced to attention to facts in any straightforward way: it is one thing to focus
attention on a glass in front of you, but a different thing to focus attention on the fact
that there is a glass in front of you. The first is a normally a perceptual act, while the
second rather seems to be an intellectual act where you contemplate a certain fact for,
say, the purpose of philosophical discussion. Even if attending to the fact that p could
be treated as a propositional attitude, most cases of attending are not cases of
attending to facts.20 If propositionalism is true for attention, then attention must be
widely studied in psychology (where it is usually called feature based attention). A few remarks on
attending to properties. First, if we attend to properties, if attending is a genuine relation (which, see
Sec. 5 we have reason to think), and if there is no paraphrase of ‘S attend to y’ that does not mention
properties, then properties exist. Second, certain views of properties (e.g. that they are identical to their
cross-world extension) are highly implausible in light of the fact that we can perceptually focus
attention on properties (the same for nominalism). Third, one might wonder about the exact
metaphysical category here. Is the object of the subject’s attention a universal that can be instantiated
by many particulars, or is it a trope (a property instance). Some psychological research suggests that at
least sometimes subject’s do not just attend to a particular property instance (the sofa’s redness) but
that feature directed attention spreads across the visual field (i.e. it spreads to the redness of other
visually presented objects) (for a review see Maunsell and Treue 2006). If that’s right, then that seems
to put pressure on the trope theory of property directed attention (though we could think of cases like
this as cases of attending to some equivalence class of tropes).
19
In some other languages attention constructions do take that clauses (thanks to Anders Nes for
pointing me to this fact). Consider German: “Fritz lenkte/richtete seine Aufmerksamkeit darauf, dass er
dieses Glas in Rom gekauft hatte.” [Frinz directed/focused his attention on/to the fact that he had
bought this glass in Rome.] Similar expressions occur in the Scandinavian languages. Several other
languages seem to be like that too (e.g. Hebrew). To my knowledge, though, in none of these language
do attention constructions only take that clauses. Further, at least in German the that clause
constructions are relatively rare. Search in an important corpus of written German (Archiv der
geschriebenen
Sprache
“Alle
öffentlichen
Korpora”
available
here http://www.idsmannheim.de/cosmas2/web-app/, containing 1.5 Billion words) reveals that “Aufmerksam(keit) darauf,
dass” constructions account for less than 0.2 % of the occurrences of “Aufmerksam(keit)”.
20
Similarly, you might like a certain fact, but most things you like are not facts. Propositionalism
cannot just ignore cases of liking objects. It has to show that liking objects can be reductively
explained in terms of propositional attitudes.
Is attention a non-propositional attitude?
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reducible to propositional attitudes in a less straightforward way. I will return to
suggestions for how such a propositional reduction may proceed below.
5
Attention seems genuinely relational
Many alleged examples of object-directed, non-propositional intentional attitudes are
linguistically expressed by so-called intensional transitive verb phrases. Examples of
such verb phrases include ‘searching for’, ‘depicting’ and ‘liking’.21 Graeme Forbes
(2006) suggests three tests for whether a predicate falls into that category:
(a) Substitution of co-referential terms may lead to truth value change
From the fact that Louise Lane searches for Superman it does not follow that
she searches for Clark Kent.
(b) The predicate allows for an unspecific reading when its syntactic object is a
determiner followed by a nominal.
‘Delilah searches for a family member’ has two readings. On one, she
searches for a specific family member (e.g. her mother). On the other, she
searches for a family member, but no specific one. There are a number of
standard linguistic tests for the existence of that unspecific reading.22 For
example, suppose that Delilah is searching for a family member, and John is
also searching for a family member. It follows that Delilah and John are
searching for the same thing (even though they are not searching for the same
person!). Similarly, we may add “Susi is also searching for that” even if she
is, again, not searching for the same person.
(c) Complement need not exist
Bill might search for the fountain of youth even though this fountain does not
exist.
Are ‘focusing attention on’ and ‘having one’s attention captured by’ then also
examples of such intensional transitive predicates? This does not appear to be so.
Attention clearly fails all three of these test.
(a’) Substitution of co-referential terms may lead to truth value change
If Adam focuses his attention on a red spot on the wall, then it follows that he focuses
his attention on a blood stain caused by a murder, even if Adam does not know that
21
Forbes (2006), and others, usually talk about intensional transitive verbs. I take it for the present
discussion we can generalize to relational verb phrases (such as searching for x, looking at x or
attending to x).
22
See Moltmann (1997, 2008) for these tests as well as others. Moltmann takes the existence of an
unspecific reading to be essential for an intensional transitive.
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this red spot is a blood stain. And if Eric’s attention was captured by a loud noise, and
that loud noise is the sound of an explosion, then Eric’s attention was captured by the
sound of an explosion (even though he did not realize that the sound was the sound of
an explosion). So, as Tye (2010, p. 429) puts it, “necessarily, if I attend to a and a is
the same as b, then I attend to b.”
(b’) The predicate allows for an unspecific reading when its syntactic object is a
determiner followed by a nominal.
Attention does not seem to allow for an unspecific reading. We cannot say that Eric’s
attention was caught by an explosion, but no particular one. And Adam cannot focus
attention on a red spot, but no particular one. Attending, indeed, fails all the linguistic
markers of a non-specific reading. To take our two examples. Suppose that Eric’s
attention was caught by an explosion. And Fatima’s attention was also caught by an
explosion (though not the same explosion). There is no reading, on which it follows
that Eric’s and Fatima’s attention was caught by the same thing. Similarly, we cannot
say “Chris’ attention was also caught by that” to refer to the fact that his attention was
also caught by an explosion (if it is not the same explosion event).
(c’) Complement need not exist
Finally, it seems that the complement of an attention predicate must exist. The
fountain of youth cannot capture anyone’s attention because it doesn’t exists (though
the idea of or pursuit of the fountain of youth might captivate someone’s attention,
but those do exist). Similarly, if there was no dagger, then Macbeth cannot focus his
attention on a dagger even if it seems to him visually as if one is in front of him.
Similarly, even if it seems to Eric as if he hears an explosion, his attention could not
be directed to an explosion if no such explosion exists.
Attention predicates thus show no signs of behaving like intensional transitives (and
indeed Forbes’ and other treatments of the subject never mention attention
constructions). Their behavior strongly indicates that they pick out genuine relations
between a subject and the object of her attention. That object must exist if she is
paying attention to it. We thus seem to get the following claim
Existence-Implication
If S attends to x (or if S’s attention is captured by x),
then there exists something to which S attends (or
something that captures S’s attention)
In the next section, I will raise a puzzle for existence implication. Before we get there,
we should make clear that from the fact that attention is genuinely relational, we
should not conclude that it is not an intentional mental phenomenon.
Consider that we cannot conclude from that fact that knowing that p is factive that
knowledge is not an intentional mental state.23 From the fact that some propositional
23
Williamson 2000.
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attitudes may take false propositions as their complements, it does not follow that all
propositional attitudes may take such false propositions. Something similar is true for
object-directed intentional phenomena. From the fact that some object-directed
intentional attitudes may be directed at non-existent objects (such as fearing or liking)
it does not follow that all object-directed intentional attitudes may be directed at nonexistent objects. Attention seems to be in the same class as seeing or hearing
something, knowing something or remembering something. All of these require that
there exists something that the subject sees or hears, knows or remembers.
The last three sections thus provide us with at least initial grounds to think of
attention is a genuinely relational, object-directed intentional attitude.
6
Attention can be engaged in hallucination
I now will pose a serious worry for this view. If attention is genuinely relational
attitude, we have to explain how, if at all, to explain that attention can be engaged in
total hallucinations. While Macbeth’s attention was not caught by a dagger if no such
dagger exists, it is hard to deny that his attention was caught by something. At least,
his attention was somehow engaged. Macbeth’s perceptual attention evidently seems
to be directed at something even though there is no real dagger there in front of him.
Here is how A.D. Smith puts it.
To say simply that our subject is not aware of anything [in a case of
hallucination] is surely to underdescribe this situation dramatically
[…] we need to be able to account for the perceptual attention that
may well be present in hallucination. A hallucinating subject may, for
example, be mentally focusing on one element in a hallucinated scene,
and then another, describing in minute detail what he is aware of.24
While a hallucinating subject arguably does not see anything or hear anything (she
only seems to see something or seems to hear something), it is hard to deny that she is
actually attending to something (she does not just seem to attend to something).
Consider the following vignette for illustration.
Suppose a patient suffers from chronic Tinnitus. She appears to hear a high pitch
sound. Let us further suppose that her experience is subjectively indistinguishable
from hearing an actual sound in her environment, and that there is no such sound in
her environment. The patient comes to her doctor with the following (indeed quite
typical) problem:
24
Smith 2002, p. 224f, emphasis added.
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Tinnitus Patient: Doctor, this sound really distracts me; it captures my
attention all the time. I can’t concentrate on anything else. How can
you help me?
Here is how a doctor may respond:
Doctor X: There is no sound. It seems to you as if there is a sound, but
there actually is none. It only seems to you as if you hear something.
What captures your attention is just an illusion created by your brain.
Here, though, is how the doctor arguably cannot respond:
* Doctor Y: There is no sound. It seems to you as if there is a sound,
but there actually is none. It only seems to you as if you hear
something. Your attention isn’t actually captured. It just seems to you
as if it is captured.
The patient’s attention does not just seem to be captured. It is actually captured by
something. It is not a sound in the environment – since there is no such sound. But the
patient would rightly complain to doctor Y that there actually is something that
captures her attention. That complaint seems legitimate, even though an analogous
claim to the effect that there actually is something the patient hears would not be.
But if attention is genuinely relational, and if attention is – as it seems – engaged in
hallucination, then there exists an object to which a hallucinating subject is related.
Since there is no unspecific reading of ‘S attends to something’ (see Sec. 5 (b’)) it
follows from the fact that the patient is attending to something that there exists some
specific thing to which she attends. Of course, and again because attention is
genuinely relational, what it is that the subject attends to need not correspond to what
she takes it to be, or to how it appears to her, or how she conceives of it. Compare:
‘Macbeth is one meter away from a dagger’ is false if there is no dagger such that
Macbeth is one meter away from it. If it were still true that Macbeth is one meter
away from something, then there must be some specific thing such that Macbeth is
one meter away from it – whether or not Macbeth (or we) have any clear conception
of what that thing is.
We thus have the hallucination puzzle: how can we explain that attention is engaged
in hallucination given that it seems to be a non-propositional and genuinely relational
intentional attitude?
How could we solve the hallucination puzzle? What could the specific thing be that
the subject is attending to?
One option would be to take it to be a mental object. This object need not be a
traditional sense-datum, since it need not be how it appears to the hallucinating
subject. Nevertheless, many will be suspicious of such mental objects.
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A second option would be to treat hallucination as extreme cases of illusion, where
some physical object or event appears to the subject radically different from the way
it actually is. Maybe our Tinnitus patient’s attention is captured by a brain event that
appears to her to be a sound in her environment. One problem for this view might be
that which brain event the subject is attending to seems radically indeterminate. 25
Another option is to hold that the hallucinating subject’s attention is captured by an
uninstantiated property complex (see Johnston 2004). The qualities that were she not
hallucinating would be instantiated by a particular sound or dagger in the case of
hallucination are uninstantiated. According to the present view the complex of these
properties is the object of a hallucinating subject’s attention. What the subject takes to
be a material object or event in fact is an uninstantiated universal. One problem for
this view might be that it commits us to a quite substantial metaphysical thesis
regarding the existence of Platonic universals simply by reflecting on our own
psychology. Not anyone will be comfortable with this sort of transcendental
argument.
Some will find one of these options defensible. But it may be worth considering
whether there are alternatives that do not commit us to metaphysically serious objects
of hallucinatory attention.
7
The Propositional View
One such option is to defend propositionalism about attention. On this view, even
though attention may appear to be a non-propositional and relational attitude, this is
not what attention really or most fundamentally is. Attending to something, on this
view, either has propositional content (cf. Tye 2010, p. 429) or is nothing more than
having attitudes with propositional content. In its most general form propositionalism
about attention requires the following view.
The Propositional View
For each instance of attending to x (or having one’s
attention captured by x), there are some propositional attitudes A1…AN and
propositions p1… pN such that attending to x (or having one’s attention captured
by x) just is bearing A1 to p1, A2 to p2, …, and AN to pN.
According to the propositional view there is nothing more to attending to something
than the bearing of certain propositional attitudes – even though attention might not
have the surface structure of a propositional attitude.
25
I have once expressed sympathies with a view like this (Watzl 2010, Ch. 5). It is also defended by
Rami El Ali (2014). In this earlier work I suggested that such indeterminacy is already present in some
clear cases of illusion, and hence poses no special problems for the case of hallucination (consider, for
example, a case where a complex set of prisms reflect light from 100 different sources such that the
subject has the visual appearance of a dagger. In such a case, it seems clear that the subject sees
something, but which specific thing is it that she sees? The answer seems highly indeterminate).
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The propositional view promises both to show that propositionalism as a general view
about intentionality can be defended and to show how to solve the hallucination
puzzle. If there is nothing more to attention than the bearing of certain propositional
attitudes, then the engagement of attention in hallucination could be explained as the
representation of certain false propositions. No extraordinary ontological
commitments to mental objects or uninstantiated universals follow from the fact that
there is something to which the hallucinating subject attends, if the fact that there is
something to which she attends just is the fact that she bears certain propositional
attitudes toward certain contents.26
How might one implement the propositional view? Which attitudes and which
propositions might be the ones so that we can understand attention on their basis?
One route – call it the cognitive strategy – claims that to focus attention on something
just is to think about that thing, and then attempts to provide a propositionalist
treatment of what it is to think about something.27
The cognitive strategy is plausible for cases of intellectual attention – where the
subject’s attention engages her cognitive capacities. Suppose a subject focuses her
attention intellectually on the issues raised by her supervisors comments. In this case,
it seems minimally that she must also think about those issues. The following
principle thus seems highly plausible.
Attention-Cognition Connection Necessarily: If S is intellectually attending to x,
then x figures in S’s thoughts.
If the cognitive strategy is adopted and thus to intellectually attend to some object just
is to think about that object, then we have a straightforward explanation of the
attention-cognition connection. Indeed, it would seem wrong to hold that the subject
engages in two intentional acts: the act of attending to those issues and the act of
thinking about those issues. To intellectually attend to something and to think about
that thing seem to be in some way the same thing.
It is unclear whether the cognitive strategy is actually going to help propositionalism
given that it is far from obvious that a propositional understanding of what it is to
think about something can actually be provided.28 Further, in order to solve the
hallucination puzzle we would still need to show how it is possible that a subject
thinks about something when she is hallucinating without appeal to there being
something she thinks about.
26
Just like no extraordinary commitments to properties follows from the fact that Susan instantiates the
property of running if for Susan to instantiate the property of running just is for Susan to run (Rayo
2013, Ch. 1). We cannot read metaphysical commitments off surface grammar.
27
See Pautz 2010, Wu 2010, Stazicker 2011.
28
See Crane 2014.
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Yet, even aside from whether the cognitive strategy would actually help, the view is
unpromising as a general strategy. The reason is that it is implausible to think that
perceptual attention to an object always requires any kind of thought about that
object. This is most obvious for exogenous attention. If a subject’s attention is caught
by some object or event this is clearly not the same as her thinking about that object
or event. First, exogenous attention is passive in a way thought is not. While a subject
may decide to think about something, she cannot decide to have her attention caught
by something. Second, attention seems to make available thought about an object; it
is not identical to such a thought. Finally, there arguably can be creatures whose
attention may be caught, but who do not have the capacity for occurrent thought.
Overall, perceptual attention appears to be a more primitive capacity than the capacity
for thought. The route to the propositional view via an account of attention as a form
of thought thus seems unlikely to succeed at least for exogenous attention capture.
Given these difficulties it appears promising to defend the propositional view by
suggesting that in the relevant cases to focus attention on something or have one’s
attention caught by something at just is to have a certain perceptual experience (or
unconscious perceptual representation) of a certain range of propositions. That is:
perceptually attending to x would just be to experience or perceptually represent
certain propositions involving or about x. Call this the perceptual strategy.
The perceptual strategy seems plausible for perceptual attention for the same reason
that the cognitive strategy seemed plausible for intellectual attention. When Adam
focuses his attention on the red spot on the wall, then Adam also perceives that red
spot. It thus seems that perception is a necessary condition for perceptual attention.
The follow principle thus is highly plausible.
Attention-Perception Connection Necessarily: If S is perceptually attending to x,
then x figures in S’s perceptual representations.29
What the attention-perception connection principle states is that it is not possible to
just perceptually attend to some object. That object must be somehow given to the
subject in a different way. This connection holds both for endogenous perceptual
attention, where the subject attends to some perceptually given object on the basis of
her goals, tasks or intentions, as well as for exogenous perceptual attention, where the
29
Note that the attention-perception connection does not require that perceptual attention is always
conscious. It is not a claim about the connection between attention and consciousness. It does not say
that being conscious of something is a necessary conditions for attending to that thing. Rather, it is a
claim about the connection between perceptual attention and perception. It says that perceiving an
object is a necessary condition for perceptually attending to that thing. While in most cases the relevant
perceptual representations are conscious, in some cases they might be unconscious perceptual
representations. Consider the engagement of attention in blindsight (see Kentridge 2011): part of what
makes it plausible to think that in these cases the subject genuinely directs her attention to an object is
that she perceives those objects (though unconsciously). Similarly, for cases of subluminal perception.
Part of what makes it plausible that in these cases the subject attends to an object in her visual field
even though she is not conscious of that object, is that the subject perceives the object – though
unconsciously.
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subject’s attention is caught involuntarily: when a stimulus catches her perceptual
attention it is also perceptually represented. The perceptual strategy has a
straightforward explanation of the attention-perception connection, since it holds that
to perceptually attend to some object just is to perceptually represent that object in
some way.
In the case of perceptual attention it is obvious though that to perceptually attend to
some object cannot just consist in perceptually representing that object. It is possible
to perceptually represent some object without directly focusing one’s attention on that
object. In order to identify attention to an object with a perceptual representation, the
perceptual strategy thus must make a claim of the following form.
Perceptual Propositionalism
There exists some proposition p such that
perceptually attending to x (or having one’s perceptual attention captured by x)
just is to perceptually represent p.
Which proposition about something could be such that perceptually representing it
amounts to attending that thing? Most ordinary and plausibly perceptually represented
propositions are obvious failures: attending to something does not consist in
representing something as having a certain color, shape, motion, as being in front of
other things, or as closer, or as having a certain contrast.
Here is one option that has a some more plausibility. One might suggest that to
perceptually attend to something is to perceptually represent that object in a
particularly determinate, clear and distinct, way. James Stazicker defends a view like
this in his recent dissertation.
I defend William James’s definition of conscious attention as the
‘focalization, concentration of consciousness’. So conceived, I
propose, attention is not a further mode of consciousness, over and
above perceptual experience and thought. Rather, attention consists in
a focusing of these modes of consciousness.30
In particular Stazicker proposes that exogenous perceptual attention can be identified
with a particularly determinate perceptual representation of that thing. Specifically, he
holds that perceptual attention consists in perceptually representing more determinate
properties of that thing than of the other objects or events one concurrently
perceptually perceives (such as a more determinate location or shape). This proposal
is partially motivated by empirical findings that exogenous attention does indeed
increase, for example, the spatial resolution of vision.31
Whether it is developed in this way or some other, perceptual propositionalism faces
serious problems.
30
Stazicker 2011. Tye 2010 suggests a similar view. Intellectual attention and endogenous perceptual
attention, on the other hand, Stazicker suggests, are ways of thinking about the object of attention.
31
Yeshurun and Carrasco 1998.
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First, qua propositional view yields what seems to be artificial accuracy conditions. A
proposition determines a condition for how the world must be. So, if attention just is
the bearing of attitudes A1… AN to propositions p1 … pN we can ask whether the
world actually is the way A1… AN represent it to be. E.g. if attending to x just is to
have a perceptual experience that represents x as having more determinate properties
(compared to other objects), then we can ask: does x have more determinate
properties (compared to other objects)? Since the answer is clearly No, it would
follow that perceptual attention misrepresents the subject’s environment. But the
question presupposed by this answer seems to be misguided: it doesn’t make sense to
ask whether things are as they are represented to be in our attention. Attention does
not determine accuracy conditions.
Second, while there can be no reasonable doubt that attention affects which
propositions a subject entertains, it would be a mistake to identify attention with these
effects, since a subject may entertain these propositions even without attention. Any
effect of attention on the content of perceptual experience for example can be
replicated even without attention. E.g. the subject could have an experience of x as
especially determinate without attention, e.g. if x is actually especially determinate
(or represented to be so through lenses in front of the subject). In other work I argue
that indeed all effects of attention on content can be replicated without attention.32
Husserl (1982 [1913], 223-224) expressed this as follows.
It is clear that, throughout such alterations [in the focus of attention]
the noematic composition of the mental process [its representational
content] remains the same insofar as the same objectivity is
continuously characterized …, presenting itself in the same modes of
appearance ….
Finally, even if these two objections fail given the large variety of ways a subject’s
attention might be engaged and the large variety of potential objects of attention, it
appears to be uphill battle to find any particular set of attitudes and propositions so
that any form of attention consists in the bearing of these attitudes and propositions. It
will be difficult for propositionalism to explain what a subject whose attention is
caught be a loud sound outside and a subject whose attention is caught by an idea
have in common. Propositionalism thus will have a hard time explaining in what
sense attending can be a unified phenomenon: it will turn out to be highly disjunctive.
I thus conclude that the propositional view most likely fails.
Based on these considerations we should thus think of attention as irreducibly nonpropositional intentional episode. Attention has a non-propositional (intentional)
character. This shows that no account of our mental life wholly in terms of
propositional attitudes can be complete; and the engagement of attention in
32
Watzl (forthcoming).
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hallucination appears to pose a serious problem to any position that conceives of
hallucination cases merely in terms of the representation of false propositions.33
8
Dependence and Independence
Given that the propositional view fails, should we conclude that attention after all is
an irreducibly non-propositional intentional attitude, and hence that the NPA
hypothesis is true? I believe that this would be too quick.
The hallucination puzzle is still looming. More importantly, the last section brought
out a feature of attention that it’s treatment as a separate attitude appears to have a
hard time explaining: the attention-perception and the attention-cognition
connections. If attention is an intentional attitude, why can it not be separated from
other attitudes? To leave the connection principles as brute metaphysical necessary
connections without further explanation seems at least implausible.
On the way to a solution, I would like to reflect on how intellectual attention
sometimes shapes propositional thought. I take it to be uncontroversial that some
occurrent thoughts or judgments (indeed, some conscious thoughts or judgments)
have propositional content: we are often not just thinking about some object, idea, or
argument. We are thinking or judging that something is the case. For example, I
might be think or judge that Ed wants coffee, that Rousseau was French or that I am
going to walk to the office today.
When the subject has an occurrent thought or makes an occurrent judgment her
attention might be engaged. Importantly, when making a certain judgment the
subjects attention might be directed towards only an aspect or part of the content that
she is judging. In language the phenomenon I am interested in is known as focus
marking.34 Here are three examples of pairs of thoughts that differ only in which part
of their content is focus marked.
(8a)
You wonder whether Ed wants coffee or tea. You think about it and
then come to judge that Ed wants [coffee]F.
(8b)
You wonder who might want coffee. You think about it and then come
to judge that [Ed]F wants coffee.
(9a)
For a long time you believed that Rousseau was French. Suddenly you
realize that Rousseau was [Swiss]F.
(9b)
For a long time you believed that there were no great Swiss
33
As well as posing problems to disjunctivism, since the subject’s attention appears to be a common
factor that is engaged in both the “good” and the “bad” cases.
34
E.g. Rooth 1992.
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philosophers. You suddenly realize that [Rousseau]F was Swiss.
(10a) You’ve been in the habit of taking public transport to your office. One
morning you come up with the brilliant idea that today you are going
to [walk]F to the office.
(10b) You’ve been in the habit of taking morning walks to various places in
your neighborhood. One morning you come up with the brilliant idea
that today you are going walk to the [office]F.
In these three examples the subject has a certain occurrent thought (she judges
something, realizes something or has a certain idea). The truth conditions for the
thoughts in each pair are plausibly identical. Yet, there is a difference in the subject’s
mental life. In (8a) the subject judges that Ed wants coffee and is focused on the fact
that he wants coffee (rather than tea), while in (8b) she judges that Ed wants coffee
and is focused on the fact that it is Ed who wants coffee (rather than someone else). It
is highly plausible that this difference at least partially is a difference in the subject’s
attention: at least part of what differs between (8a) and (8b) is what the subject
attends to.
In these cases we thus seem to have the same thought but a difference in focus of
attention. While linguists often model this phenomenon by taking sentences that
differ in focus to express different structured propositions (these are different lambdaabstractions), it seems pretty clear that whether or not these models are appropriate
these complex lambda-propositions are not “what goes through your head” when you
are consciously thinking those thoughts. It’s extremely natural to think, I think, that
these difference in focus just are difference in the focus of your attention when you’re
thinking the relevant thoughts. When you’re thinking that Ed wants coffee, your
attention might be on Ed or it might be on the coffee (in fact: it can also be on him
[wanting]_F the coffee as well).
What we see in the case of intellectual attention thus is that, on the one hand, the
operation of attention depends on and hence necessitates the occurrence of certain
thoughts. On the other hand, its structure need not match the structure of those
thoughts. While the thoughts have propositional structure, attention often picks up on
aspects of the contents of those thoughts and not their whole contents.
There is a general lesion to be learned from the considerations of both this and the last
section. On the one hand, attention appears to be intimately tied to certain (other)
intentional attitudes. It does not seem possible to just attend to something. There must
always be some other way the subject represents the object of her attention, be it
perceptually or cognitively. On the other hand it seems implausible to identify
attending to some object with those ways of representing the object of the subject’s
attention. Thus, there seems to be both a certain form of dependence of attention on
other intentional attitudes, and a form of independence of other intentional attitudes.
How could both of these be true? Call this The Dependence/Independence Puzzle.
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Structuralism
What stands in the way of a proper account, I believe, is the attitudinal building block
model. The building block model assumes mental structure monism (there is exactly
one correct partitioning of a subject’s mental life into its most fundamental elements).
Instead we should accept mental structure pluralism (a subject’s mental life can be
partitioned along several equally appropriate dimensions). In particular, we need to
distinguish the attentional structure of the subject’s mental life from its
representational structure. Once we do that, I will now argue, we can solve the
dependence/independence puzzle. In addition, we can make serious progress also
towards solving the hallucination puzzle.
Consider coming to think that [Ed]F wants coffee. Call this mental episode the Ed
episode. Your intellectual attention is on Ed, and not on him wanting coffee. The fact
that you are intellectually attending to Ed in this particular case depends thinking that
he wants coffee. It is not an independent attitude added to having a thought with that
propositional content. Yet, whether you are attending to Ed is also not fixed by the
propositional content of your thought. We can see how both of these could be true, if
we allow that the Ed episode can be partitioned in two distinct ways.
First, it can be partitioned into attitude and content. The attitude here is thought and
the content is the proposition that Ed wants coffee. This partitioning captures the
representational structure of the Ed episode, and hence fixes the conditions under
which that episode would be accurate, i.e. just if Ed wants coffee.
Second, it can be partitioned into what its attended and what is not attended. What is
attended is Ed, and what is not attended is him wanting coffee. This partitioning is
independent of the representational structure of the Ed episode. The attentional
structure fixes what is attended and what is not.
What then is the attention structure of the Ed episode?
Very roughly it is a structure that partitions the Ed episode into what is more and
what is less psychologically salient or prominent in that episode. We can make this
more precise as follows.
Let e be the Ed episode. e is a specific mental occurrence or event. Now divide e into
two parts, the focal (or more prominent) part eEd and the peripheral (or less
prominent) part ewantingcoffee. eEd is the part of the Ed episode that makes reference to
Ed, and ewantingcoffee as the part that predicates wanting coffee of Ed (though remember
that both eEd and ewantingcoffee are parts of the mental episode not parts of the content of
that mental episode). What constitutes that our subject is attending to Ed is the fact
that in e eEd is more central than (or more prominent than) ewantingcoffee (or equivalently
that ewantingcoffee is peripheral (or less prominent) relative to eEd). We can capture this
structure as follows: let ‘P’ stand for the relationship of peripherality between two
mental episode parts, where e1Pe2 just in case e1 is peripheral relative to e2. The
attention structure of the Ed episode then is given by the fact that ewantingcoffeePeEd.
Is attention a non-propositional attitude?
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Generally, the attention structure of a mental episode e is given by <{ei}, eiPej>
where {ei} is a partitioning of that episode e such that each ei is a part of e and a
structure of peripherality on that partitioning provided by the peripherality relation P.
This attention structure of a mental episode has a straightforward interpretation.
Attention prioritizes certain parts of a mental episode over others. This prioritization
orders the parts of that mental episode from the most central to the most peripheral
(though arguably sometimes the structure can be more complex). What is important
for present purposes is that which parts of a mental episode are prioritized is largely
independent of how that mental episode represents the world to be. And indeed, we
would expect such independence, since prioritizing some aspects of a mental
representation should not interfere with the accuracy conditions of that mental
episode. Two fully accurate representations of how things stand with Ed should be
able to differ with respect to whether you are primarily concerned with Ed or with the
fact that he wants coffee (or with the fact that he wants it, rather than hates it).
Attentional priority plays a different role in our mental economy than representational
accuracy, and hence we should expect that the representational structure of a mental
episode and it attentional structure can vary largely independently of each other.
Mental episodes, on the view I am proposing, thus have a multi-dimensional
mereological structure, i.e. the fact that an episode can be partitioned in one way is
compatible with the fact that it can also be partitioned in a different way. According
to mental structure pluralism, a mental episode thus can have both propositional
structure as well as attentional structure. To these correspond two distinct and
compatible ways of partitioning the relevant episode. If e is some propositional
attitude, we can put this as follows.
e = <{ei}, eiPej> = A-ing that p.
The fact that the attentional structure of the event of judging, for example, is
independent of its propositional structure thus should not seduce us into thinking that
events of thinking that p can be reduced to non-propositional attitudes such as
thinking about something or predicating something of something. We should thus not
think that a mental episode has some parts that are given independently of facts about
attention and that these parts then enter into relations of relative peripherality when
the subject attends to something. The relevant parts just are those aspects of a mental
that can lead to differences in attention (no attention-independent partitioning
presupposed). We should thus not think of the attentional parts like referring to x, or
predicating F-ness, etc. as separable attitudes. The subject could not refer to x without
thinking some propositional thought about x. The parts that occur in the attention
structure of a mental episode are rather divisions within that mental episode, not
independent existents.
With this structuralist account we have a straightforward account of what
distinguishes intellectual and perceptual attention and what they have in common.
What differs is what is getting structured. In the case of perceptual attention, it is a
perceptual episode. In the case of intellectual attention, it is a cognitive episode. What
Is attention a non-propositional attitude?
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they have in common is their structure. Both perception and cognition may be
partitioned and structured by the peripherality relation. If they are so structured we
have perceptual and intellectual forms of attention.
While attention may come in distinct intellectual and perceptual forms, this is not an
essential part of the structuralist proposal. It is rather an empirical question.
Attentional structure need not follow the attitudinal contours of a mental life. Maybe
a whole mental life at a time has an attention structure. What matters is which aspects
of a subject’s mental life are structured by peripherality relations.
10 The Questions Answered
With structuralism at hand, let us now readdress the questions that came up along the
way.
Question 1: In what sense is attention an intentional phenomenon?
I have argued earlier that attention is intentional according to both the pragmatic, the
phenomenological and the intuitive conception of intentionality. What does the
structural view of attention say about the intentional character of attention along these
three dimensions? I will take them in reverse order.
First, according to structuralism attention is a certain priority structure within our
mental life. Suppose that Wayne Wu’s argument is right that prioritizing certain
elements over others is essential for intentional action, because it is essential to
solving the many-many problem. Structuralism has a straightforward account of how
attention may serve that function, since it just is a certain priority structure within the
subject’s mental life. In particular, subject’s would not be able to solve the manymany problem if their perceptual experience would be unstructured. In order to
explain why the subject performed one action rather than another we thus have to
appeal not only to how her experience and beliefs represented her environment to be,
but also to how that experience (and possibly belief) are attentionally structured
(which aspects were prioritized). Attentional structure thus will be intentional
according to the pragmatic picture that identifies intentional phenomena with those
phenomena that play an essential role in the rationalizing explanation of intentional
action.
Second, the phenomenological conception of intentionality conceived of the
intentionality of a subject’s mental life as her having a certain point of the on the
world. According to structuralism attention contributes to that point of view because
it organizes the subject’s mental life so that some of its elements are more central
(and others more peripheral) than others. The structure of the subject’s mental life is
part of her unique subjective perspective on the world. Differences in perspective
may be difference in the attention structure. Structuralism can thus explain why
attention may count as an intentional phenomenon according to the phenomenological
Is attention a non-propositional attitude?
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conception: it makes an important contribution to the subject’s unique perspective or
take on the world.
Third, according to the intuitive conception attention is paradigmatically intentional
because it is directed at particular objects, properties or events. Structuralism explains
the paradigmatic intentional character of attention indirectly. Consider a subject who
is perceptually attending to the explosion outside her window. According to
structuralism a subject’s undergoing that mental episode just is for the subject to have
a perceptual experience that – among other things – represents that explosion (not
necessarily as an explosion) such that there is a part of that perceptual experience that
represents that explosion that is more central in the subject’s experience than the
other parts. Why would having a perceptual experience with that structure be in a
paradigmatic way about the explosion? The intentional directedness of attention on
the structuralist conception piggybacks on the intentional directedness of what is
structured, in this case perceptual experience. The explosion experience represents the
subject’s environment. The explosion is a part of that environment. The subject’s
experience is especially about that part, because the part of her experience that deals
with that part of the environment is prioritized.
Question 2: In what sense is attention a non-propositional phenomenon?
According to structuralism attention is a non-attitudinal structure in a subject’s mental
life. It creates a partitioning of a subject’s mental life into what is more central (or
prioritized) and what is more peripheral (or deprioritized). The aspects that are
prioritized need not have propositional structure. For a subject to focus her perceptual
attention on a certain event like a sound, for example, is for there to be a part of her
perceptual experience that deals with that sound to be prioritized relative to other
parts. It is compatible with structuralism that perceptual experience is a propositional
attitude. Yet the attention structure of that experience is not captured by its
propositional content. The same holds for intellectual attention. Even a thought with
propositional content can be structured by attention into non-propositional aspects
(some of which get prioritized over others). Indeed, structuralism is compatible with
the claim that all of a subject’s mental attitudes are propositional attitudes. Because
attention is not an attitude it poses no counterexample to this formulation of
propositionalism. Yet, structuralism is incompatible with the claim that all of
subject’s mental life consists in her bearing a variety of propositional attitudes (the
building block model). Even once we list all of a subject’s propositional attitudes we
have missed what is attended and what is not.
Question 3: How is the dependence/independence puzzle solved?
The dependence/independence puzzle consisted in a tension between the following
two claims. On the one hand, in order to attend to something a subject must represent
the object of her attention in some other way. It is impossible to just attend to
something. On the other hand, attending to something does not just consist in some
way representing the object of her attention. Structuralism solves that puzzle
straightforwardly. Since attention is a structure of (an aspect of) the subject’s mental
Is attention a non-propositional attitude?
25
Watzl
life, there can be no attention without a mental life characterized independently of
attention. Since intellectual attention, for example, just is a structure in the subject’s
cognition, it presupposes cognition. Similarly, since perceptual attention is a structure
in the subject’s perceptual representations, it presupposes that there are such
perceptual representations. In this sense, attention thus depends on other aspects of
mentality. Structuralism thus is compatible with and indeed explains the attentionperception connection and attention-cognition connection principles. At the same
time structuralism also explains why attention cannot be reduced to those perceptual
or cognitive states on which it depends. It is a structure of the subject’s mental life
that is not captured by simply listing the aspects of the subject’s mental life that it
structures.
Question 4: How is the hallucination puzzle solved?
Structuralism can straightforwardly explain how the attention of a hallucinating
subject may be engaged. According to structuralism, attention most fundamentally is
a structure in the mental life of the subject. Some aspects of that mental life are
prioritized over others. Given that it is uncontroversial that the mental life of a
hallucinating subject exists, there is no difficulty for some parts of that mental life to
be prioritized over others. So, the attention of our Tinnitus patient is engaged since
her auditory experience as of a sound gets involuntarily prioritized over other aspects
of her mental life. This, indeed, is a plausible description of what is disturbing for her.
While she might want to prioritize thinking about her work, it is her auditory
experience that gets actually prioritized. Arguably this is all that we need to account
for.
Yet, some may not find this completely satisfactory. Don’t we also need to explain
how the subject’s attention can be directed at what seems to her a sound in her
environment? That is: don’t we need to explain that there is some seemingly external
object that captures her attention?
We can make progress by noting that attentional structure in a certain sense creates
subject-dependent objects out of the representation of propositional contents. In the
attention structure there will be a part of the Tinnitus patient’s auditory experience
that is prioritized. That part of her experience moves to the center of the attention
structure. It is uncontroversial that the relevant part of the experience exists. Yet, the
centrality of that part of the subject’s experience also marks a part of the content of
her experience. We can think of that part as the mirror image of the relevant location
in the structured experience in the content of that experience. The existence of that
“highlighted” part of the content directly depends on relative centrality of a part of the
subject’s experience. In that sense it is a mind-dependent object of the relevant
experience. The object of hallucinatory attention thus indeed exists, but its existence
is entirely dependent on and explained by the fact that an episode of hallucinatory
attention exists. It is, in that sense, no further fact. This, thus, solves the hallucination
puzzle.
Question 6: In what sense is attention genuinely relational?
Is attention a non-propositional attitude?
26
Watzl
With the foregoing we can also explain the sense in which attention is genuinely
relational. As we saw attention constructions do not appear to be intensional transitive
verb phrases. A subject’s attending to something, I concluded, thus presupposes the
existence of a particular thing to which she is attending. Structuralism provides a
deflationary understanding of the relational character of attention. A subject’s
attending to something just is for her mental life to have an attentional structure.
What a subject is attending to is explained by the mental episode that is attentionally
structured together with the attentional structure of that mental episode. For example,
suppose that Macbeth is perceptually attending to a real dagger. That episode consists
in having a perceptual experience in which the experience of the dagger is relatively
prominent. Now suppose that Macbeth is hallucinating a dagger in way that is
subjectively indistinguishable from perceptually attending to the real dagger.
According to the structuralist account she is indeed attending, since some part of her
experience is more central than the other parts. She is not attending to the dagger
though, since that part of her experience does not refer to the dagger (since there is no
such dagger). What she is attending to – in the case of hallucination – is entirely
dependent on the existence of her attentionally structured experience. On the
structuralist account, the fact that attention is object-direct thus is explanatorily
posterior to the fact that a certain aspect of the subject’s experience bears the relation
of priority (or relative centrality) to other aspects of her experience.
Conclusion
The account of the non-propositional character of attention argued for in this paper
has a number of consequences that are worth summarizing here.
•
the non-propositional character of perceptual attention is compatible with the
claim that perceptual experience has propositional content.
•
the popular building block model should be rejected. We should accept mental
structure pluralism.
•
in order to account for the engagement of attention in perceptual hallucination
we need to start from the structure of perceptual experience, not from its
objects.
The account of the non-propositional character of attention provided in this paper
may have consequences also for how to think of other apparent examples of nonpropositional attitudes. For several of these examples might be partially constituted
by certain ways of attending. For example, there are looking at and for something,
watching something, imagining or visualizing something, scrutinizing something, etc.
Whether some of the resources developed in this paper can be applied to other
candidates of non-propositional attitudes (which plausibly are not attention-entailing)
such as fearing, needing, expecting or wanting is left for another occasion.
Is attention a non-propositional attitude?
27
Watzl
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