Attention as Selection for Action Defended

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (forthcoming)
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Abstract

Attention has become an important focal point of recent work in ethics and epistemology, yet philosophers continue to be noncommittal about what attention is. In this paper, I defend attention as selection for action in a weak form, namely that selection for action is sufficient for attention. I show that selection for action in this form is part of how we, the folk, experience it and how the cognitive scientist studies it. That is, selection for action pulls empirical and folk-psychology together. Accordingly, philosophers who take seriously either source have reason to work with selection for action as their starting conception of attention. This conception provides a way to bridge empirical and philosophical concerns where attention is central. The theoretical advantages of selection for action have been obscured by the common opinion that it is easily refuted. I defend the position against many of the published objections and then deploy it to provide a foundation for the intuitive, but inchoate idea of attention being more or less, focusing on recent work in the ethics of attention.

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Wayne Wu
University of Pittsburgh

Citations of this work

Automatically minded.Ellen Fridland - 2017 - Synthese 194 (11).
Attention, seeing, and change blindness.Michael Tye - 2010 - Philosophical Issues 20 (1):410-437.
Ethical Attention and the Self in Iris Murdoch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.Antony Fredriksson & Silvia Panizza - 2022 - Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 53 (1):24-39.
Consciousness and the limits of memory.Joseph Gottlieb - 2018 - Synthese 195 (12):5217-5243.

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References found in this work

Reference and Consciousness.John Campbell - 2002 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
Prejudice as the misattribution of salience.Jessie Munton - 2021 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (1):1-19.
Attention Is Amplification, Not Selection.Peter Fazekas & Bence Nanay - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (1):299-324.
Attention as Selection for Action.Wayne Wu - 2011 - In Christopher Mole, Declan Smithies & Wayne Wu (eds.), Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 97--116.

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