Attention and the new sceptics

In response to new research into the phenomena of inattentional blindness and change- blindness, several philosophers and vision researchers have proposed a novel form of scepticism: they contend that we do not have the conscious experience that we think we have. I will show that this claim is not supported by the evidence usually cited in support of it, and I expose what I believe to be the underlying error motivating this position: the belief that consciousness is either focal (what occupies the focus of attention) or non- existent. Once we appreciate the phenomenology of the periphery of attention, we see that we have the resources to place the problematic phenomena in our peripheral.