RESEARCH DESCRIPTION
Sebastian Watzl
My research focuses on the structure of mentality. I investigate an interconnected set of issues related to
questions of how the mind is organized. My main approach to these quite general philosophical questions
consists in a philosophical investigation of attention pursued in close contact with empirical psychology
and the neurosciences.
1.
ATTENTION AND THE ORGANIZATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
While attention has long been recognized as a central aspect of the mind in psychology and the
neurosciences, it has long been neglected as a topic of philosophical interest. One central aspect of my
research investigates the roles of attention for the organization of consciousness.
In a series of papers as well as in a forthcoming book, I argue that attention plays an important role for
the structure of consciousness: conscious attention consists in the agent’s activity of structuring
experiential episodes so that some of its parts are more central than others. I argue that experiential
episodes have two types of phenomenal properties, phenomenal qualities and phenomenal structure.
Phenomenal qualities, I suggest, are best explicated by the way the world appears to the subject when she
undergoes an experiential episode. Phenomenal structure, on the other hand, concerns the way the parts
of a complex experiential episode are put together. Attention consists in the subject’s activity that results
in phenomenal structure. Phenomenal structure unlike phenomenal qualities are manifest as the subject’s
own contribution to her experience, because – as I argue – she has reflexive awareness of her activity of
structuring (in roughly the way we are aware also of own bodily activities). I show how to make all of
these ideas precise. They result in a novel view of the field of consciousness.
I say that attention is an activity. What does this imply? In another part of my forthcoming book I discuss
this question. Activities have a certain temporal shape (a way they unfold over time) and a certain kind of
causal structure. They consist in the ongoing causing and causally sustaining of certain kinds of resultant
states by certain kinds of (internal) driving states. Activities in this sense are what a subject does, though
not all of these doings are intentional (and so many activities are not intentional actions).
In the case of attention, the resultant state is a phenomenally structured experience. What are the relevant
driving states? In my book I argue that in cases of voluntary attention, they are the subject’s intentions or
goals. In cases of involuntary attention, I argue that attention is driven by salience. I explicate the notion
of salience: salience fundamentally is a property of mental states (derivatively it is also a property of
what these mental states represent): it is its phenomenally manifest potential to affect changes in
phenomenal structure. I defend this non-reductive view of salience against alternatives, and show how
such a notion of salience can play the important explanatory roles it seems to play in theories of bounded
rationality, linguistic development, and others.
What then is the overall significance of attention in the architecture of the conscious mind? I argue that
attention is central to the unity and the subjectivity of consciousness. The conscious episode that
subsumes all other under it is the subject’s structuring activity. Consciousness is unified just as long as
the subject has one unique attention system. Furthermore, the subject’s reflexive awareness of structuring
explains why her experience has subjective character (in this aspect, my views are similar to so-called
self-representation theories of consciousness). In these senses attention is fundamental to consciousness
(even if, as I think, there can also be unconscious attention, and consciousness outside attention).
Empirical research shows that attention affects not just phenomenal structure, but also phenomenal
qualities. Things look different when you focus your attention on them. Another part of my research
addresses the philosophical significance of these results. In an influential recent publication, Ned Block
has argued that empirical findings concerning the way attention affects appearances undermine an
intentionalist account of phenomenal qualities such as apparent contrast, size or color. I show how
Block’s argument can be made precise (the argument is of the same type as ones that appeal to spectral
inversion); then I show that once the argument is properly understood several recent responses to it fail;
and finally I provide my own response that draws on the idea that the central functions of perception and
RESEARCH DESCRIPTION
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WATZL
attention are distinct and thus may diverge. Part of the upshot of this discussion is to bring out the
strength of the resources at the disposal of intentionalism as an account of phenomenal qualities.
As I have introduced phenomenal structure, it is not described in terms of representational attitudes and
their contents, the vocabulary used by intentionalist accounts of phenomenal properties. Could
intentionalists nevertheless explain how attention structures consciousness? In some work in preparation
I discuss this question. Several intentionalist proposals in the recent literature fail. Yet, there is one that
mirrors the structuralist view. In a recent paper in preparation (“Can intentionalism explain how attention
structures consciousness”) I argue that it is nevertheless inferior to it, since it neglects the comparative
character of attention.
The relationship between attention and intentionality has a further dimension connected to the question
whether all intentionality is propositional. In a forthcoming paper I argue first that attention is a (maybe
the) paradigmatic case of an object-directed, non-propositional intentional mental episode. In addition
attention cannot be reduced to any other (propositional or non-propositional) mental episodes. Yet,
second, I argue that attention is not a non-propositional mental attitude. It might appear puzzling how
one could hold both of these claims. I show how to combine them, and how that combination shows how
propositionality and non-propositionality can co-exist in a mental life. The crucial move is one away
from an atomistic, building block picture to a more holistic, structural picture. I end by speculating how
the picture developed here might help to account for other non-propositional aspects of mentality.
2.
THE PERSONAL AND THE SUB-PERSONAL
Considerations about attention and consciousness are one way to become philosophically interested in
attention. Another way is by considering the metaphysics of attention: what kind of thing is attention?
In the case of many mental states or processes, it is fairly clear whether they are personal level states or
processes or whether they are rather sub-personal states or processes (computational processes or brain
processes). In the case of attention, this is not so clear. While folk-psychology seems to treat attention as
a personal level phenomenon, scientific psychology and neuroscience often seems to view it as a specific
set of brain processes. Can these two perspectives be reconciled? If so, how?
In a recent article, as well as in the first chapter of my forthcoming book, I argue that the identification of
attention with sub-personal processes fails because there is not enough unity to the processes that
underlie attention. These processes rather form a diverse group. This gives us reason to view attention as
a personal level process with diverse sub-personal underpinnings.
How does the view that attention is a personal level process (or activity) compare with other nonreductive accounts of its nature? In my review of Christopher Mole’s recent book about attention, I
compare the process view to his “adverbial” position. I argue that the process view is superior in its
ability to account for involuntary attention. In the last chapter of my forthcoming book, I discuss further
the connection between personal level and sub-personal level treatments of attention, as well as the
connection between the activity view of attention, and the view that it is a mental capacity.
The discussion of the nature of attention, as we have seen, raises questions about the connection between
personal level and sub-personal level in the context of detailed empirical investigation. In the future I
plan to work more on what that distinction amounts to, and what its significance might be.
In connection with my engagement with psychological and neuroscientific theories, I have also become
interested in general questions concerning the explanatory role of notions of intentionality and
representation in scientific theories. While at Harvard I co-organized a reading group on that topic
(together with Rosa Cao, a neuroscientist (now also philosopher) from MIT), and together with Carsten
Hansen and George Rey I am currently planning a workshop on it. In this aspect of my work, I strongly
draw on my own empirical and computational work in biology, where – among other things – I focused
on the navigational capacities of honey bees (the result of which was a paper that has been widely cited
by empirically minded philosophers), and developed information theoretic models of sensory processing
(in my MA thesis at the Institute for Theoretical Biology in Berlin, and in contribution to a publication
that appeared in the Journal of Neurophysiology). In the future I intend to expand this area of my
research. In particular, I will investigate the connections between the notion of representation that is used
in the sciences of mind, the notion of intentionality that has it root in perceptual experience, and the
evaluation of beliefs and utterances as true or false (see Sec. 4 below).
RESEARCH DESCRIPTION
3.
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THE NATURE OF PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE
My interest in the structure of perceptual experience goes beyond my interest in the organizing role of
attention.
First, there is the temporal structure of the stream of consciousness. No one would hold that you have an
experience of red just in case your experience itself is red. By contrast, many philosophers have claimed
that you have an experience of change just in case your experience itself is changing. In general, it is
widely held that there is a close match between the temporal structure of the content of experience
(“what you are experiencing”) and the temporal structure of experience itself. In a recent paper I argue
against such a structural matching thesis on the basis of a series of recently discovered new visual
illusions. The structural matching thesis holds for temporal properties no more than for other properties.
This result, though obtained on the basis of psycho-physical experiments alone, fits well with what we
know about temporal processing in the brain.
Second, there is the question of whether we are aware of anything when we hallucinate. Does having a
perceptual experience as of a particular object or event, like a tomato or an explosion, imply that there is
some particular object or event of which you have an experience or of which you are aware? A negative
answer to this question is almost universally accepted. Defenders of that view appeal to the possibility of
hallucination and argue that these are the cases where someone might have a perceptual experience as of
some particular object or event, without being related to a particular object or event, because there is no
such object or event to be aware of or be related to. Against this consensus, in a paper in preparation I
present an extended argument for the positive view and shows how the view might be correct. The
upshot of my argument is that there is no convincing reason not to think of all hallucinations as extreme
cases of illusion. This is because there is a smooth transition between any case of veridical experience
and a case of hallucinatory experience by a range of intermediary cases. I argue that this smooth
transition argument does not have the vices of Sorites-style reasoning. I suggest that phenomenal
qualities can be analyzed as a three-place relation between a subject, a particular object or event, and a
way that object or event appears to the subject
Third, as we have seen perceptual experiences are often modeled as intentional episodes: they are
psychological modes or attitudes with content. But this leaves open an important question (and one that
has long been neglected): what kind of attitudes are perceptual experiences? We can think of the mode of
an intentional episode as the mental analogue of a linguistic speech act or utterance. Speech acts,
famously, are variegated. There are assertions, imperatives, questions, suppositions, guesses, requests,
invitations, and more. Which of these are the linguistic analogues of the mode(s) found in perceptual
experience? Until recently, the default assumption, hardly even discussed, has been that perceptual
experience, like belief or judgment, is assertoric. But this default is starting to be questioned: maybe
perception presents its content as a mere guess? Or maybe there are perceptual narratives with a question
and answer structure? Maybe some experiences function as imperatives that present something as to be
done rather than as being true? Can some insights in recent enactive approaches to perception be
captured if intentionalist models are extended to include imperative as well as assertoric elements? If
perceptual experience indeed had suppositional, assertoric, interrogative and imperative components,
how do these components interact? How, if at all, are they unified within a subjects experience? In two
workshops in preparation Susanna Siegel and I explore these questions together with philosophers of
mind and language that have worked in these areas. Furthermore, in a paper in preparation, I argue that
perceptual experience tells us what to do. It doesn’t merely inform us, but also guides us. In this respect
experience is like desire or intention, or an imperative speech act. I rest my argument on the case of
perceptual salience discussed above (though there might be other examples). Some experiences are more
salient than others and guide our attention to the salient object or event. Perception tells us what to focus
on. I discuss how the guiding function of experience can be integrated with its informing function.
4.
ATTENTION AND THE ORGANIZATION OF AGENCY
I recently started a larger project on executive attention and executive control, extending my work on the
role of attention to cover the cross-temporal organization of our mental lives. The project investigates the
organization of agency by looking into the way executive attention structures our activities. This project
spans the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of action.
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WATZL
The structuring of consciousness discussed above is context-sensitive and subject to continuous change.
Yet, complex agents need more permanent forms of organization that lead to stable behavioral
dispositions even in radically changing environments. Many such behavioral dispositions, of course, are
arrived at automatically. But organisms are not at their mercy. They are able to select among options,
take on some and neglect others, and have the capacity to set cornerstones that won’t be revised easily. I
propose that a form of attention is again relevant in this context. It too is a form of structuring, and is
sometimes called central or executive attention (or executive control). It involves the capacity to keep
focused on long-term projects or goals. This capacity seems to be essential to advanced forms of agency,
it is connected to notions of reflective distance (Korsgaard 2008) or strength of will (Holton 2009).
When agents apply executive attention they make certain commitments (Holton 2008, 2009). I again
investigate this form of attention by bringing together scientific work on executive control with
philosophical tools, and investigate what exact role commitments (like belief or intention) play in this
context.
The issues in this project potentially connect to an important set of questions in epistemology. Epistemic
questions, so the general picture, might be viewed as a special instance of the kind of normative
questions that arise in the organization of mind: which plans or commitments should I make? Should I
stick to them given a new option or should I revise them – and if so, how? Epistemic questions then are
questions like these: how should I make up my mind in inquiry? Should I stick to what I already believe
in the face of new information, or should I revise my beliefs – and if so, how? In general, how ought we
to organize the web of beliefs? When looked at this way we may ask about the relationship between
questions in epistemology and questions in ethics. For example: should we be epistemic
consequentialists and explain what we epistemically ought to do in terms of the states it is epistemically
good to be in (such as knowledge or understanding)? Or should we be epistemic deonologists and
explain what we epistemically ought to do without reference to such aims (e.g. see the belief revision
literature in formal epistemology)? These question will be explored more in the future, and in this respect
I hope to draw on collaborations with epistemologists.
5.
ATTENTION AND OTHER TOPICS
EPISTEMOLOGY
In the future I plan to look closer at the epistemic roles of attention. Few would doubt that proper
attention makes us more reliable in our belief forming processes (Wayne Wu and I discuss this feature of
attention in a recent book review in the context of introspective beliefs). What is the epistemic
significance of that? I will be particularly concerned with how the metaphysics of perception interact
with its epistemology and with the epistemic role of perceptual attention. In addition, I will investigate
whether and how the structure and active nature of perceptual attention might be of epistemic
significance (e.g. think of attention-involving activities like observing).
MORAL PSYCHOLOGY
The empirical investigation of attention is largely driven by a practical concern with attention disorders.
What – in general – is a disorder of attention? What characterizes “good” attention? In particular I will
investigate in what ways the capacity for sustained attention or the capacity for certain forms of attention
may be intrinsically connected to valuable traits such as intelligence, intellectual curiosity, empathy, or
open-mindedness. Adrienne Prettyman and I have recently presented on this topic, and are planning to
write on it further in the future. Furthermore, I plan to investigate questions in the neuroethics of
attention: more and more children and teenager are diagnosed with attention deficits. What should our
reaction be in light of problems with attention? Are there reasons to prefer non-medical interventions
over medical ones? If so, what might these be?
JOINT ATTENTION AND COOPERATION
Attention is not just a phenomenon at the level of the individual. We often jointly attend to something
together with someone else. The phenomenon of joint attention has been argued to be of crucial
importance for linguistic development, and some (Tomasello in particular) have argued that the capacity
for joint attention has played a crucial role in human evolution. In a recent book review I distinguish a
number of questions about joint attention. One of them concerns the nature of the phenomenon. In a
paper in preparation I argue that it is based in the perceptual experience of another’s directing our
attention (a mental action). Another question concerns the significance of the phenomenon. In the future,
I will specifically consider its role for rationalizing co-operation.