Attention is essential to the life of the mind, a central topic in cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. Traditional debates in philosophy stand to benefit from greater understanding of the phenomenon, whether on the nature of the self, the foundation of knowledge, the natural basis of consciousness, or the origins of action and responsibility. This book is at the crossroads of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, offering a new theoretical stance on the concept of attention and how it intersects (...) with other functions of the mind, such as perception, consciousness, and action. It presents attention as directed by a subject, essential for perception, but not consciousness or action. By taking seriously the existence of a subject it stands against current trends in philosophy and cognitive science. This book offers an account of the subject and its role in attention that will both help motivate a subject-centered account and avoid some of the common criticisms regarding its existence. It engages with work by many philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, including Block, Campbell, Dickie, Husserl, James, Koch, Mack and Rock, Merleau-Ponty, Treisman, and Wu. (shrink)
We present several quantitative analyses of the prevalence and visibility of women in moral, political, and social philosophy, compared to other areas of philosophy, and how the situation has changed over time. Measures include faculty lists from the Philosophical Gourmet Report, PhD job placement data from the Academic Placement Data and Analysis project, the National Science Foundation's Survey of Earned Doctorates, conference programs of the American Philosophical Association, authorship in elite philosophy journals, citation in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and (...) extended discussion in abstracts from the Philosopher's Index. Our data strongly support three conclusions: (1) Gender disparity remains large in mainstream Anglophone philosophy; (2) ethics, construed broadly to include social and political philosophy, is closer to gender parity than are other fields in philosophy; and (3) women's involvement in philosophy has increased since the 1970s. However, by most measures, women's involvement and visibility in mainstream Anglophone philosophy has increased only slowly; and by some measures there has been virtually no gain since the 1990s. We find mixed evidence on the question of whether gender disparity is even more pronounced at the highest level of visibility or prestige than at more moderate levels of visibility or prestige. -/- . (shrink)
The absence of a common understanding of attention plagues current research on the topic. Combining the findings from three domains of research on attention, this paper presents a univocal account that fits normal use of the term as well as its many associated phenomena: attention is a process of mental selection that is within the control of the subject. The role of the subject is often excluded from naturalized accounts, but this paper will be an exception to that rule. The (...) paper aims to show how we might reinstate the subject into the act of attention, endorsing the ordinary notion that attention is a direction of the mind by the subject, rather than a mere occurrence or happening. To do so, it lays out the best work of phenomenology, psychology, and neuroscience on specifying the nature of attention and, in finding them individually wanting, combines them into a unified view that avoids the problems of each. (shrink)
This paper explores whether consciousness can exist without attention. This is a hot topic in philosophy of mind and cognitive science due to the popularity of theories that hold attention to be necessary for consciousness. The discovery of a form of consciousness that exists without the influence of attention would require a change in the way that many global workspace theorists, for example, understand the role and function of consciousness. Against this understanding, at least three forms of consciousness have been (...) argued to exist without attention: perceptual gist, imagistic consciousness, and phenomenal consciousness. After first arguing that the evidence is inconclusive on the question of whether these forms of consciousness exist without attention, I here present a fourth form of consciousness that is likely to be more successful: conscious entrainment. I argue that conscious entrainment is a form of consciousness associated with skilled behavior in which attention is sometimes absent. (shrink)
This carefully designed, multi-authored textbook covers a broad range of theoretical issues in cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience. With accessible language, a uniform structure, and many pedagogical features, Mind, Cognition, and Neuroscience: A Philosophical Introduction is the best high-level overview of this area for an interdisciplinary readership of students. Written specifically for this volume by experts in their fields who are also experienced teachers, the book’s thirty chapters are organized into the following parts: I. Background Knowledge, II. Classical Debates, III. (...) Consciousness, IV. Crossing Boundaries. -/- Each chapter starts with relevant key words and definitions and a chapter overview, then presents historical coverage of the topic, explains and analyzes contemporary debates, and ends with a sketch of cutting edge research. A list of suggested readings and helpful discussion topics conclude each chapter. This uniform, student-friendly design makes it possible to teach a cohort of both philosophy and interdisciplinary students without assuming prior understanding of philosophical concepts, cognitive science, or neuroscience. -/- Key Features: -/- Synthesizes the now decades-long explosion of scientifically informed philosophical research in the study of mind. Expands on the offerings of other textbooks by including chapters on language, concepts and non-conceptual content, and animal cognition. Offers the same structure in each chapter, moving the reader through an overview, historical coverage, contemporary debates, and finally cutting-edge research. Packed with pedagogical features, like defined Key Terms, Suggested Readings, and Discussion Questions for each chapter, as well as a General Glossary. Provides readers with clear, chapter-long introductions to Cognitive Neuroscience, Molecular and Cellular Cognition, Experimental Methods in Cognitive Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Science, Metaphysical Issues, and Epistemic Issues. (shrink)
Wayne Wu argues that attention is necessary for action: since action requires a solution to the ‘Many–Many Problem’, and since only attention can solve the Many–Many Problem, attention is necessary for action. We question the first of these two steps and argue that it is based on an oversimplified distinction between actions and reflexes. We argue for a more complex typology of behaviours where one important category is action that does not require a solution to the Many–Many Problem, and so (...) does not require attention. (shrink)
How does attention contribute to perceptual experience? Within cognitive science, attention is known to contribute to the organization of sensory features into perceptual objects, or “object-based organization.” The current paper tackles a different type of organization and thus suggests a different role for attention in conscious perception. Within every perceptual experience we find that more subjectively interesting percepts stand out in the foreground, whereas less subjectively interesting percepts are relegated to the background. The sight of a sycamore often gains the (...) visual foreground for a nature lover, whereas the sound of a violin often gains the auditory foreground for a music lover, but not necessarily vice versa. How does the perceptual system organize early sensory processing according to the subject’s interests? The current paper reveals how this subject-based organization is brought about and maintained through top-down attention. In fact, the current paper argues that top-down attention is necessary for conscious perception in so far as it is necessary for bringing about and maintaining the subject-based organization of perceptual experience. (shrink)
Some of the oldest and deepest questions in philosophy fall under the umbrella of consciousness and mind: What is the mind and how is it related to the body? What provides our thoughts with content? How is consciousness related to the natural world? Do we have distinctive causal powers? Analytic philosophers have made significant progress on these and related problems in the last century. Given the high volume of work on such topics, this chapter is necessarily selective. It offers major (...) touchstones but is slanted in favor of work that touches base with the sciences. The chapter starts by describing the progression of thought on the mind-body problem, from dualism and behaviorism to non-reductive materialism. It then describes the problem of intentionality, with a focus on partial solutions from Dretske and Millikan, ending with a brief discussion of 4E theories of mental content. The section on the problem of consciousness starts with the well-known knowledge and modal arguments before describing some attempted initial solutions, such as eliminative materialism and panpsychism. Finally, there is a brief section on agency and free will, which focuses on the link between free will and consciousness. (shrink)
Peak human performance—whether of Olympic athletes, Nobel prize winners, or you cooking the best dish you’ve ever made—depends on skill. Skill is at the heart of what it means to excel. Yet, the fixity of skilled behavior can sometimes make it seem a lower-level activity, more akin to the movements of an invertebrate or a machine. Peak performance in elite athletes is often described, for example, as “automatic” by those athletes: “The most frequent response from participants when describing the execution (...) of a peak performance was the automatic execution of performance”. While the automaticity of skilled behavior is widely acknowledged, some worry that too much automaticity in skill would challenge its ability to exhibit human excellence. And so two camps have developed: those who focus on the automaticity of skilled behavior, the “habitualists,” and those who focus on the higher-level cognition behind peak performance, the “intellectualists.” We take a different tack. We argue that skilled behavior weaves together automaticity and higher-level cognition, which we call “pluralism.” That is, we argue that automaticity and higher-level cognition are both normal features of skilled behavior that benefit skilled behavior. This view is hinted at in other quotes about automaticity in skill—while expert gamers describe themselves as “playing with” automaticity, expert musicians are said to balance automaticity with creativity through performance cues: “Performance cues allow the musician to attend to some aspects of the performance while allowing others to be executed automatically”. We describe in this paper three ways that higher-level cognition and automaticity are woven together. The first two, level pluralism and synchronic pluralism, are described in other papers, albeit under different cover. We take our contribution to be both distinguishing the three forms and contributing the third, diachronic pluralism. In fact, we find that diachronic pluralism presents the strongest case against habitualism and intellectualism, especially when considered through the example of strategic automaticity. In each case of pluralism, we use research on the presence or absence of attention to explore the presence or absence of higher-level cognition in skilled behavior. (shrink)
In Explaining Attitudes, Baker argues that we should treat our everyday practices as relevant to metaphysical debates, resulting in a stance of realism with respect to intentional explanations. In this chapter I will argue that if one is going to be a practical realist about anything, it should be the self, or subject of attention. I will use research on attention combined with the stance of practical realism to argue in favor of a substantive self. That is, I will present (...) an account of the self that directs and controls attention, in line with our everyday view of the self. I will contrast this account with what I call the “illusion view,” which presents the self and its apparent causal power in the case of attention as an illusion. My account of the self will make use of several of Baker's ideas, including non-reductive materialism and broad supervenience. (shrink)
This is a good time for such a substantial book on Buddhaghosa. His ideas may be more difficult to digest than those of contemporary authors, but Ganeri convincingly argues for their relevance. Together with Ganeri’s considerable interpretive and philosophical work, Buddhaghosa’s view helps to fill out a perspective that is popular in cognitive science, in which the self is replaced by systems. In this case, the self is replaced by systems of attention, a view that Ganeri calls ‘Attentionalism.’ In this (...) review I will focus on two aspects of the account that I find especially puzzling, with the hope that this leads to further elucidation, whether by Ganeri or others. Specifically, I will focus on the concepts of ekaggatā, or “placing,” and anatta, or “no-self,” as interpreted by Ganeri. (shrink)
In 2018 Academic Placement Data and Analysis ran a survey of doctoral students and recent graduates on the topics of diversity and inclusivity in collaboration with the Graduate Student Council and Data Task Force of the American Philosophical Association. We submitted a preliminary report in Fall 2018 that describes the origins and procedure of the survey [1]. This is our final report on the survey. We first discuss the demographic profile of our survey participants and compare it to the United (...) States general population, its doctoral students, and APA membership, finding several areas of underrepresentation (i.e. gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic, and veteran status). We then discuss the results of questions regarding diversity and inclusivity. We find, for instance, that participant comfort in philosophy depends on gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, disability, and language status and that participants most often mentioned the theme of diversity when asked how philosophy could be more inclusive. Finally, we discuss the results of questions related to graduate program and placement. We find, for example, that underrepresented graduates are both less likely to recommend their graduate program to others and less likely to prefer an academic job. We close by making some recommendations for the APA and for the discipline based on our findings. (shrink)
You have thoughts, feelings and desires. You remember your past and imagine your future. Sometimes you make a special effort, other times you are content to simply relax. All of these things are true about you. But do you exist? Is your sense of self an illusion, or is there something in the world that we can point to and say: ‘Ah, yes – that is you’? If you are familiar with the contemporary science of mind, you will know that (...) the concept of a substantive self, separate from the mere experience of self, is unpopular. But this stance is unwarranted. Research on attention points to a self beyond experience, with its own powers and properties. (shrink)
Academic Placement Data and Analysis (APDA) has released its complete 2017 Final Report, an 81-page document that collects data on PhD-granting philosophy programs (including ratings by former students, placement rates, and diversity) and the discipline as a whole (including hiring networks, placement maps, cluster analyses of programs, job descriptions, non-academic hiring). The report was created by Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Patrice Cobb, Pablo Contreras Kallens, and Angelo Kyrilov, all of University of California, Merced. (from Daily Nous).
An important topic in the ethics of technology is the extent to which recent digital technologies undermine user autonomy. Supporting evidence includes the fact that recent digital technologies are known to have an impact on attention, which balances "bottom-up" and "top-down" influences on cognition. As described in numerous papers, these technologies manipulate bottom-up influences through cognitive fluency, intermittent variable rewards, and other techniques, making them more attractive to the user. We further reason that recent digital technologies reduce the user’s ability (...) to exert top-down attention due to the scale of the content—they provide far more content at a much faster pace than other technologies, which over time reweights the balance of attention in favor of bottom-up influences. After reviewing evidence for these effects, including their temporal duration, we consider their downstream effects on both autonomy and creativity. We find that while the impact of recent digital technologies on top-down attention may allow for more idea generation, that creativity also depends on control, which is undermined by these technologies. We are more circumspect with autonomy, reasoning that in certain cases it might not make sense to see user autonomy as harmed through these effects. We conclude with other ways that recent digital technologies may improve creativity, which may act as an offset to the detrimental impacts of these technologies. (shrink)
The chapter provides an overview of the structure and content of the textbook to help situate the reader. It begins by introducing this unique collaborative project, including a general introduction to the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience. It then segues into explaining the structural features of each chapter that provide uniformity across the textbook. The chapter concludes with an overview of the content provided in the textbook. Through a survey of the major themes and their interconnections the reader (...) will be better able to appreciate the rich interplay between philosophy and cognitive neuroscience in each of the topical chapters. (shrink)
Pessoa envisions an approach to neuroscience that treats the brain as an “interactionally complex system”: a system that cannot be understood through analysis and manipulation of its parts. I provide reason to support Pessoa's overall approach while putting pressure on some of the specific claims. -/- .
The first research report of the APDA project. Findings include that "gender is a significant predictor of type of placement (i.e. permanent versus temporary). The intercept tells us that the odds for male participants to have a permanent academic placement within the first two years after graduation are statistically significant at .37, p < 0.001 when year of graduation is held constant. The odds for female participants to have a permanent academic placement are 1.85, p < 0.001 when graduation year (...) is held constant. In terms of di fferences, the odds of having a permanent (versus temporary) academic placement are 85% greater for females as compared to males.". (shrink)
Academic Placement Data and Analysis (APDA), a project funded by the American Philosophical Association (APA) and headed by Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced), aims “to make information on academic job placement useful to prospective graduate students in philosophy.” The project has just been updated to include new data, which Professor Jennings describes in a post at New APPS. She also announces a new interactive data tool with which one can sift through and sort information. (from Daily Nous).
Like many who work on attention, Wu takes William James as an anchor point, concluding, "So, James was right" (274). In fact, this book can be seen as a continuation of James' project -- as with James' "Attention," Wu's book provides an extensive review of current research on attention.[1] In fact, he engages at length with an impressive amount of work in contemporary philosophy and science, mentioning 10 such researchers – Ned Block, John Campbell, Marisa Carrasco, David Chalmers, David Marr, (...) Christopher Mole, Jesse Prinz, Declan Smithies, George Sperling, and Anne Treisman -- more than 30 times each. Readers interested in contemporary research on attention could learn a great deal from these discussions.[2] The book nonetheless falls short of serving as a complete review of research on attention -- a point Wu in fact accepts (9). Two conspicuous absences include historical philosophy and phenomenology, both of which I discuss briefly below. (shrink)
Whether active and passive, top-down and bottom-up, or endogenous and exogenous, attention is typically divided into two types. To show the relationship between attention and other functions (sleep, memory, learning), one needs to show whether the type of attention in question is of the active or passive variety. However, the division between active and passive is not sharp in any area of consciousness research. In phenomenology, the experience of voluntariness is taken to indicate activity, but this experience is often confused (...) with others. In psychology, task-dependent behavior is taken to indicate activity, but is often conflated with complex automatic behavior. In neuroscience, top-down processes are taken to exclusively indicate activity despite the fact that both top-down and bottom-up activations are always present in the brain. Moreover, work in attention has shown that the results of so-called passive and active processes are sometimes inseparable. Carrasco, et al. (2004), for example, show that active attention results in the same change in perceptual contrast that is enacted by bottom-up mechanisms. Likewise, Reynolds and Desimone (2003) show that top-down and bottom-up attention effect neural contrast in the same way. Thus, the passive-active distinction does not seem to neatly separate two types of attention. Perhaps a more convincing model of attention combines active and passive processing into a single mechanism of control. One such potential model is what we call the Unitary Saliency Map Model, first suggested by Koch and Ullman (1985) and developed by Treue (2003). In such a model, top-down and bottom-up processes each feed into the same saliency map, from which attention is controlled. We argue that this makes sense of the phenomenological, psychological, and neuroscientific data. Finally, the acceptance of such a model will force us to review some of our previous findings on attention and its relation to consciousness. (shrink)
In this paper I argue that the prioritization of sensory input by top-down attention is constitutive of and essential to conscious perception. Specifically, I argue that top-down attention is required to provide informational integration at the level of the subject, which can be contrasted with integration at the level of features and objects. Since the informational content of conscious perception requires integration at the level of the subject, top-down attention is necessary for conscious perception as we know it. I present (...) this argument through a theory, which I call the “Standard Theory.” According to this theory, top-down attention brings about subject-level integration for sensory input by prioritizing that input with respect to a subject-level standard. (shrink)
Mental control refers to the ability we have to control our own minds. Its primary expression—attention—has become a popular topic for philosophers in the past few decades, generating the need for a primer on the concept. It is related to self-control, which typically refers to the maintenance of preferred behavior in the face of temptation. While a distinct concept, criticisms of self-control can also be applied to mental control, such as that it implies the existence of an unscientific homunculus-like agent (...) or is not a natural kind. Yet, as this Element suggests, a scientifically-grounded account of mental control remains possible. The manuscript is organized into five main sections, which cover 1) the concept of mental control, 2) the relationship between mental control and attention, 3) the phenomena of meditation and mindwandering, 4) attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and 5) emergence-based accounts of mental control, including an original account by the author. (shrink)
