Abstract

Attention plays a central role in the production of conscious experience (CE): there cannot be CE without some form of attention. Equally important for the production of CE are the cognitive processes that feed and pilot attention. These processes are performed by the self. The self provides the input for attentional processing. CE arises when attention processes the input provided by the self. Any research intended to analyze how CE is produced, including the CE of linguistic meaning (LM), must take into account the operations performed by attention and the self. The awareness of the role played for CE production by attention and the self opens a new perspective for semantic studies. From this perspective, LMs can be seen as condensed instructions on the operations that attention and self must perform in order to produce the relevant CEs. Consequently, LMs can be analysed in terms of these operations.