Abstract
Theories of phenomenal intentionality have been claimed to resolve certain worries about the indeterminacy of mental content that rival, externalist theories face. Thus far, however, such claims have been largely programmatic. This paper aims to improve on prior arguments in favor of phenomenal intentionality by using attention and Gestalt principles as specific examples of factors that influence the phenomenal character of perceptual experience in ways that thereby help determine perceptual content. Some reasons are then offered for rejecting an alternative interpretation of these examples, according to which the phenomenal effects of attention and Gestalt principles play no role in the determination of perceptual content.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Perhaps the most representative example of CTC is Fodor’s (1987) Asymmetric Dependence theory.
This line of criticism has been forcefully pressed by Gates (1996).
The most extensive defense of TTC that I know of against these kinds of determinacy objections is Neander (2017, ch. 7–9), but I don’t think she fully addresses the problem raised here. Much of her defense relies on the claim that even in cases where F and G are “locally co-instantiated” and were moreover both “causally implicated in the selection of” a certain representation producing system S, S can nevertheless still produce representations in response to instances of F “in virtue of their [F]-ness” without likewise responding to the coinstantiated instances of G “in virtue of their [G]-ness.” In cases, though, where F and G are necessarily coincident, it is unclear what could entitle us to say that it is F-ness rather than G-ness that S is responding to. In a footnote, Neander (2017, 167fn21) acknowledges the problem that Gates’ (1996) gavagai-style cases raise for TTC, but offers no response. Contrary to the general drift of her remarks there, I also see no reason why such cases shouldn’t raise the same difficulties for externalist accounts of non-conceptual, sensory-perceptual representations that they do for conceptual representations.
The basic idea is to make use of Peacocke’s (1992, 88–9) observation that certain concepts constitutively depend on perception, in that one cannot possess such concepts unless one is disposed to deploy them when in certain perceptual states. Insofar as the content of the perceptual states that figure in the possession conditions of such concepts is determined by perceptual experience, the same will likewise be true (albeit in a much more indirect sense) of the content of any non-perceptual mental states in which such concepts figure.
Block (2010) offers a slightly different interpretation of Carrasco et al.’s (2004) study, arguing that while it does show that attention alters apparent contrast, the phenomenal effects of attention are not accompanied by any changes in perceptual content, because one’s perceptions of a patch while attending to it and while not attending to it are both non-illusory. However, one might agree with Block that subjects’ perceptions of the unattended and attended patch in Carrasco et al.’s study are both non-illusory while denying that this implies that both perceptions have the same content. For instance, one might follow Stazicker (2011) and Nanay (2010) in holding that attention alters perceptual content by making it more determinate (in the determinable-determinate sense) than it would otherwise be. When attending solely to one of two patches with the same specific, determinate contrast C, subjects may thus perceive the attended patch as having C while perceiving the unattended patch as having some determinable level of contrast C* that has C as one of its determinates. Just as a perception of a scarlet surface as red isn’t illusory, but merely less determinate than a perception of it as scarlet, so too neither of these perceptions of the patches need qualify as illusory despite their differences in content.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to address this issue. I return to it in the following section.
I’ll henceforth refer to these principles collectively as “grouping principles” or “principles of perceptual grouping.”
Palmer and Rock (1994, 39) tell a slightly different story, according to which the classical Gestalt “grouping processes occur only after UC elements have been detected and after attention has been deployed to a set of such previously defined elements.” For evidence that Gestalt grouping is instead pre-attentive, see Lamers and Roelofs (2007), Lamy et al. (2006), and Russell and Driver (2005).
The reason for this qualification will be made clear below, where it is argued that ascription of determinate content to sub-personal representations* depends ultimately on the role they normally play in producing personal-level representations+ whose content is determined by their phenomenal character.
Many thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this objection.
References
Baylis, G., & Driver, J. (1992). Visual parsing and response competition: The effect of grouping factors. Perception and Psychophysics, 51, 145–162.
Beck, J., & Schneider, K. (2017). Attention and mental primer. Mind and Language, 32, 463–494.
Block, N. (2010). Attention and mental paint. Philosophical Issues, 20, 23–63.
Campbell, J. (2002). Reference and Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carrasco, M., Ling, S., & Read, S. (2004). Attention alters appearance. Nature Neuroscience, 7, 308–313.
Carruthers, P., & Veillet, B. (2011). The case against cognitive phenomenology. In T. Bayne & M. Montague (Eds.), Cognitive Phenomenology (pp. 35–36). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, D. (1979). The inscrutability of reference. Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 10, 7–19.
Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining Behavior. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Duncan, J. (1984). Selective attention and the organization of visual information. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 113, 501–517.
Fodor, J. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gates, G. (1996). The price of information. Synthese, 107, 325–347.
Horgan, T., & Graham, G. (2012). Phenomenal intentionality and content determinacy. In R. Schantz (Ed.), Prospects for Meaning (pp. 321–344). De Gruyter.
Horgan, T., & Tienson, J. (2002). The intentionality of phenomenology and the phenomenology of intentionality. In D. Chalmers (Ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (pp. 520–533). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kriegel, U. (2011). Cognitive phenomenology as the basis of unconscious content. In T. Bayne & M. Montague (Eds.), Cognitive Phenomenology (pp. 79–102). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lamers, M., & Roelofs, A. (2007). Role of gestalt grouping in selective attention: Evidence from the stroop task. Perception and Psychophysics, 69, 1305–1314.
Lamy, D., Segal, H., & Ruderman, L. (2006). Grouping does not require attention. Perception and Psychophysics, 68, 17–31.
Loar, B. (2003). Phenomenal intentionality as the basis of mental content. In M. Hahn & B. Ramberg (Eds.), Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge (pp. 229–257). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lormand, E. (1996). Nonphenomenal consciousness. Noûs, 30, 242–261.
Mendelovici, A. (2018). The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Millikan, R. (1984). Language Thought and Other Biological Categories. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Millikan, R. (1989). Biosemantics. Journal of Philosophy, 86, 281–297.
Nanay, B. (2010). Attention and perceptual content. Analysis, 70, 263–270.
Neander, K. (2017). A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Palmer, S. (1999). Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Palmer, S., & Rock, I. (1994). Rethinking perceptual organization: The role of uniform connectedness. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1, 29–55.
Peacocke, C. (1992). A Study of Concepts. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Prinzmetal, W. (1995). Visual feature integration in a world of objects. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 4, 90–94.
Quine, W. V. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Russell, C., & Driver, J. (2005). New indirect measures of ‘inattentive’ visual grouping in a change-detection task. Perception and Psychophysics, 67, 606–623.
Searle, J. (1987). Indeterminacy, empiricism, and the first person. Journal of Philosophy, 84, 123–146.
Searle, J. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Stazicker, J. (2011). Attention, visual consciousness and indeterminacy. Mind and Language, 26, 156–184.
Strawson, G. (2010). Mental Reality (2nd ed.). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Treisman, A. (1998). Feature binding, attention, and object perception. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 353, 1295–1306.
Treisman, A., & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97–136.
Wertheimer M. (1938). Laws of organization in perceptual forms. In W. Ellis (Ed.), Source Book of Gestalt Psychology (pp. 71–88). Harcourt, Brace, and Co.
Wu, W. (2014). Attention. Abingdon: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
White, B. Attention, Gestalt Principles, and the Determinacy of Perceptual Content. Erkenn 87, 1133–1151 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00234-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00234-3