This dissertation examines the significance of Johann Nikolas Tetens, a German empiricist philosopher working in the 1770's, to the theoretical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. I begin by examining Tetens' discussion of philosophical methodology in his 1775 essay \textit{Über die allgemeine speculativische Philosophie}. I make the case that Tetens' criticism of the methodology of the Scottish common sense philosophers and his subsequent attempt to incorporate what he takes to be their valuable insights into the approach of the broadly Wolffian philosophical tradition (...) provides important context for interpreting Kant's methodology in the \textit{Critique of Pure Reason}. I then examine two different cases of Tetens' applying this methodology in his 1777 text \textit{Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung}. I argue that Tetens' discussion and critique of Humean causation in the fourth essay of the \textit{Philosophische Versuche} heavily influenced Kant's understanding of ``Hume's Problem'' and that many of the more obscure issues about the Kant-Hume relationship can be greatly clarified by giving sufficient attention to Tetens. I then examine Tetens' engagement with Thomas Reid's account of perception. I argue that Tetens' attempt to develop a representationalist account of perception which withstands Reid's objections leads him toward the view that representation requires object concepts and the problem of accounting for the origin of these concepts pushes Tetens to articulate an account of synthesis. In the final chapter, I examine Kant's proof that the real of appearances has intensive magnitude in the Anticipations of Perception. I raise several difficulties for the interpretation of the proof and then argue that Tetens' discussion of perception can provide us with the context for such a proof and the nature of the ``correspondence'' between sensation and objects. (shrink)

Is attention both necessary and sufficient for consciousness? Call this central question of this treatise, “Q.” We commonly have the experience of consciously paying attention to something, but is it possible to be conscious of something you are not attending to, or to attend to something of which you are not conscious? Where might we find examples of these? This treatise is a quest to find an answer to Q in two parts. Part I reviews the foundations upon which the (...) discourse on Q is built. Different inputs to Q produce different answers. After consideration of the many ways “attention” and “consciousness” have been defined, I settle upon phenomenal consciousness and Executive Attention (defined as a suite of strategies for structuring cognition for further processing implemented by the executive of working memory) as the most interesting inputs to Q, and the ones on which Part II focuses. Attention without consciousness seems relatively easy to establish empirically, but consciousness without attention is much harder. The putative candidates all seem to have major problems, but I build a strong abductive case for the hitherto ignored case of foveal phenomenal overflow. We consciously see far more detail in our foveal fields than we can Executively Attend, although there is a serious obstacle to our ever confirming that empirically—identifying conscious content relies on Executive Attentional report. Triangulating the capacity limitations of attention, consciousness, and working memory strengthens this case for consciousness without attention, and suggests that cognition must work something like my “Witches’ Hat Model,” on which content can become conscious outside of Executive Attention or working memory. I conclude with some reflections on the implications of my arguments for the discourse on Q, and for other discourses such as the ontologies of attention and consciousness, theories of consciousness, some other cognitive concepts, and ethical considerations in humans, animals, and machines. A conclusive answer to Q continues to elude us. It may perhaps be an ultimately insoluble conundrum. But it is the very essence of humanity to seek an answer, and in so doing, to improve our understanding of our own nature: “The proper study of mankind is man.”1. (shrink)

My dissertation establishes the basis for a systematic outlook on the role language plays in human cognition. It is an investigation based on a cognitive conception of language, as opposed to communicative conceptions, viz. those that suppose that language plays no role in cognition. I focus, in Chapter 2, on three paradigmatic theories adopting this perspective, each offering different views on how language contributes to or changes cognition. -/- In Chapter 3, I criticize current views held by dual-process theorists, and (...) I develop a picture of the complex interaction between language and cognition that I deem more plausible by using resources from the literature on the evolution of the faculty of language. Rather than trying to find one general explanation for all cognitive processes, I take seriously the idea that our mind is composed of many subsystems, and that language can interact and modify each in different ways. There is no reason offered in the empirical literature—besides maybe parsimony—that suggest that language has to interact in the same ways with all cognitive processes. Yet, this is seemingly taken for granted, especially within dual-process approaches. -/- On my view, it is a central requirement for a theory of the role of language in cognition to explain how language might have effects, at once, on and within various parts of cognition. In Chapter 4, I explore how this framework can modify how we think about some experiments in psychology, specifically in research on categorization. My idea is that language, once it evolved, changed how some cognitive capacities worked and interacted with each other, but did so in more than one or two ways. Cognitive systems are changed in very different ways—sometimes the transformation is very subtle, such as our way of forming categories by using how similar objects are, while other times it is deep and changes the very way the system works. (shrink)