Perceptual content is indexed to attention

Adrienne Prettyman

pp. 4039-4054

in: Richard Dietz (ed), Vagueness and probability, Synthese 194 (10), 2017.

Abstract

Attention seems to raise a problem for pure representationalism, the view that phenomenal content supervenes on representational content. The problem is that shifts of attention sometimes seem to bring about a change in phenomenal content without a change in representational content. I argue that the representationalist can meet this challenge, but that doing so requires a new view of the representational content of perception. On this new view, the representational content of perception is always relative to a way of attending. I call this the attention-indexed view of perceptual content.