Dans ce manifeste, le collectif The Friends of Attention invite à prendre soin de l’attention pensée comme « attensité ». Soit une méfiance envers ceux qui valorisent la seule capacité de l’esprit à rester concentré et qui stigmatisent, par corollaire, les moments de distraction. À l’inverse, il s’agit de se réjouir et de préserver la diversité des dynamiques attentionnelles, essentiellement multiples, qui ne contrarie que ceux qui cherchent à réduire l’attention à une monoculture uniformisante.

Kantian virtue can be construed as a condition of an agent which secures adherence to the requirements of morality in the face of the ever-present possibility of inner conflict with counter-ethical considerations. This paper claims that this conception of virtue does not fit in well with one essential characteristic of the virtuous agent; that he or she is attentive to the well-being of others. After some preliminary remarks about virtue-related evaluations, the paper criticises the Kantian conception of virtue in the (...) light of certain characteristics of ethical attentiveness. The paper concludes by developing a notion of ethical habituation which includes the training of attention. (shrink)

Examination of the application of virtue ethics to business has only recently started to grapple with the measurement of virtue frameworks in a practical context. This paper furthers this agenda by measuring the impact of virtue at the level of the organisation and examining the extent to which organisational virtue (OV) impacts on moral attentiveness (MA) and the perceived role of ethics and social responsibility in creating organisational effectiveness (PRESOR). It is argued that people who operate in more virtuous (...) organisational contexts will be expected to be more attentive to ethical issues and in turn perceive a greater role for ethics and social responsibility in business. Analysis of results based on a sample of 137 HR professionals shows that where people report that their organisation provides meaningful work, they are more likely to display reflective MA and the belief that ethics and social responsibility are compatible with business objectives, suggesting that organisations who are interested in promoting an ethical culture should focus on their work structures and practices. More generally, OV is shown to have a more complex relationship with PRESOR than hypothesised pointing towards a more nuanced view of OV. The paper examines the implications of the results for organisations and research. (shrink)

Corruption devours profits, people, and the planet. Ethical leaders promote ethical behaviors. We develop a first-stage moderated mediation theoretical model, explore the intricate relationships between ethical leadership and employee ethical behaviors, and treat ethical climate and organizational justice as dual mediators and leaders’ moral attentiveness as a moderator. We investigate leadership from two perspectives—leaders’ self-evaluation of moral attentiveness and members’ perceptions of ethical leadership. We theorize: These dual mediation mechanisms are more robust for high moral leaders than low (...) moral leaders. Our three-wave data collected from multiple sources, 236 members and 98 immediate supervisors in the Republic of Iraq, support our theory. Specifically, ethical leadership robustly impacts organizational justice’s intensity and magnitude, leading to high employee ethical behaviors when leaders’ moral attentiveness is high than low. However, ethical leadership only influences the ethical climate’s intensity but has no impact on the magnitude when leaders’ moral attentiveness is high than low. Therefore, organizational justice is a more robust mediator than the ethical climate in the omnibus context of leader moral attentiveness. Our findings support Western theory and constructs, demonstrating a new theory for Muslims in Arabic’s emerging markets. Individual decision-makers apply their values as a lens to frame their concerns in the immediate and omnibus contexts to maximize their expected utility and ultimate serenity-happiness. Ethical leadership trickles down to employee ethical behaviors, providing practical implications for improving the ethical environment, corporate social responsibility, leader-member exchange, business ethics, and economic potentials in the global competitive markets. (shrink)

This research examines the relationships between education in business ethics, Reynolds’s (J Appl Psychol 93:1027–1041, 2008) “moral attentiveness” construct, or the extent to which individuals chronically perceive and reflect on morality and moral elements in their experiences, and Singhapakdi et al.’s (J Bus Ethics 15:1131–1140, 1996) measure of perceptions of the role of ethics and social responsibility (PRESOR). Education in business ethics was found to be positively associated with the two identified factors of moral attentiveness, “reflective” and “perceptual” (...) moral attentiveness, and with the PRESOR “stakeholder view” factor. Also, reflective moral attentiveness was found to act as a mediator in the relationship between education in business ethics and the PRESOR stakeholder view factor. Evidence of gender and social desirability bias effects was also found. The implications of these relationships and social cognitive theory for improved understanding of the mechanisms by which a variety of variables have their effects on PRESOR in business are discussed. (shrink)

This article focuses on the structures of humor and joke telling that require particular kinds of attentiveness and particular relationships between speaker and audience, or more specifically, between classmates. First, I will analyze the pedagogical and relational preconditions that are necessary for humor to work. If humor is to work well, the person engaging in humor needs to gauge their interlocutors carefully. I discuss, too, the kinds of listening necessary for listening for the joke, including attentiveness to complex (...) possibilities for meaning. This attentiveness to complexity is linked to curiosity and a willingness to be startled, two qualities that are central to the risk and pleasure of learning discussed by Socrates and Maria Lugones. Examining the place of risk in Socrates’ teaching and the place of serious play in Maria Lugones’ discussion of difference, I suggest that humor can help to illuminate complicities and invite more robust interactions with difference, creating pleasurable encounters to work through difficult social divisions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Ethical leaders can influence followers’ ethical behaviors by establishing an ethical climate. However, followers’ responses to an ethical climate may also differ according to the amount of attention they devote to moral questions. This study analyzes whether moral attentiveness augments the positive effect of an ethical climate on employees’ ethical behaviors, as well as the indirect effect of ethical leadership on employee ethical behavior through an ethical climate. Data from 270 employees in the Malaysian manufacturing industry indicate that (...) the positive impact of an ethical climate on ethical behavior is greater among employees who exhibit high rather than low moral attentiveness; this moderating role also applies to the relationship between ethical leadership and employee ethical behavior through the ethical climate. This study thus sheds new light on the notable role of moral attentiveness in ensuring that ethical leadership and ethical climate enhance ethical behavior in the workplace. (shrink)

This article is about caregivers being attentive to patients in healthcare. From earlier work on the understanding of the other, we know that it is impossible to completely understand the experiences of others. By the sharing of subjectivity—intersubjectivity—we may try to ‘grasp’ the other’s point of view. However, we can never assume that the same experience produces the same experience. Now, if it is principally impossible to understand the experience of one another, and if paying attention always implies an understanding (...) of what to pay attention to, then how is it possible to be attentive to the experiences of those who are entirely at the mercy of our care? How can caregivers perceive the impossibility of understanding the experiences of patients as an appeal to be attentive to their experiences? This is discussed in this article. It departs from the authors being confronted with inexplicabilities in the empirical study of attentiveness in healthcare. It presents two examples and discusses the meaning of these emergent properties. This leads to a discussion of the existent literature on the indefiniteness and openness of attentiveness. It becomes clear why, although we can understand and predict much of it, attentiveness will always be characterized by a certain uncontrollability as well. (shrink)

This study focuses on the reliability and validation of the Chinese version of the Moral Attentiveness Scale. Factor analysis confirmed that the scale includes two factors: perceptual moral attentiveness and reflective moral attentiveness. Moral attentiveness is negatively correlated with normlessness and positively associated with internalization and symbolization, moral identity, and other academic dishonesty behaviors. Reflective moral attentiveness moderated the relationship between formalism and unethical decision making. All results showed that the Chinese version of the Moral (...) Attentiveness Scale has satisfactory psychometric properties and is a valid and reliable measurement of moral attentiveness in the Chinese population. (shrink)

Employees’ organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is an important determinant of organizational effectiveness; hence, scholars and practitioners are particularly interested in the factors, mechanisms, and conditions that promote such behaviors. Guided by the ability–motivation–opportunity framework, we draw on the social cognitive theory of moral thought and action to conceptualize a model that delineates the role of ethics-oriented human resource management (HRM) systems in promoting OCBs through the mediating role of employees’ moral attentiveness. We also refer to the job demands–resources theory (...) to describe the moderating role of work-family balance in the indirect relationship between HRM systems and OCBs. The findings of an experiment involving 157 working adults (Study 1) and a three-wave field survey of 328 employees (Study 2) converge to support the hypothesized direct and indirect (via moral attentiveness) relationships between ethics-oriented HRM systems and OCBs as well as the first-stage moderating role of work-family balance. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In the expanding field of ethical leadership research, little attention has been paid to the association between ethical leaders’ ethical characteristics and perceived ethical leadership, and, more importantly, the potential influence of ethical leadership on followers’ ethical characteristics. In this study, we tested a theoretical model based upon social cognitive theory to examine leaders’ moral identity and moral attentiveness as antecedents of perceived ethical leadership, and follower moral identity and moral attentiveness as outcomes of ethical leadership. Based upon (...) data from 89 leaders and 460 followers in China, collected at two points in time, we found that leaders’ moral identity and moral attentiveness are associated with follower’s perceptions of ethical leadership. Ethical leadership is, in turn, associated with their followers’ moral identity and moral attentiveness. We found furthermore that ethical leadership mediates the effect of leaders’ moral identity on followers’ moral identity, but not the effect of leaders’ moral attentiveness on followers’ moral attentiveness. We discuss the findings, theoretical contributions, practical implications, and future research. (shrink)

Being attentive to European Parliamentary (EP) elections is a decisive prerequisite in becoming more knowledgeable about EU affairs as well as eventually participating in EU politics. Even though attentiveness to politics is a common way of acquiring political information en passant, empirical studies in this realm are scarce. By systematically integrating content analysis data (N = 6432 news stories) with a three-wave panel survey (N = 1497), this study examines the explanatory factors for citizens’ attentiveness to the 2014 (...) EP election. OLS regression models demonstrate that turnout intention and political activity predict citizens’ attentiveness to the election. Media consumption of EU news marginally drives attention to the election. (shrink)

In intensive European agricultural areas, the control of weeds and wildlife within plots is of great importance. Yet, we can observe in many farming systems a renewal of farmers’ relationships with nature. Using the theoretical framework of care ethics, this paper aims to answer the following question: how observing plots allows farmers to develop more cooperation with nature in field crops? We base our results on an ethnographic survey conducted in Wallonia (Belgium) in 2019 among farm advisors and farmers in (...) conventional, organic and conservation agriculture. The 19 in-depth interviews crossed partly with micro phenomenological interviews and participant observation sessions revealed that: (1) Observing plots increase farmers’ attentiveness to plots and plants, and favor care and knowledge based on direct contact with nature ; (2) Such observations renew how farmers take care of their plots and plants, towards adaptation, limitation and reduction of pesticides; (3) They also allow farmers to cooperate with specific species. In conclusion, we underline the importance of direct knowledge on agrosystems based on attentiveness to enable farmers to diversify how they relate to non-humans and especially how they care for their plots and plants. The attentiveness developed through plot observations thus enables farmers to establish more complex relationships with nature, made up of ecological care, based in particular on cooperation with non-humans. This emphasizes the value of the ethic of care in order to build communities. Declaration of competing interest. (shrink)

Deviant workplace behaviors (DWB) cause enormous costs to organizations, sparking considerable interest among researchers and practitioners to identify factors that may prevent such behavior. Drawing on the theory of moral development, we examine the role of ethics-oriented human resource management (HRM) systems in mitigating DWB, as well as mechanisms that may mediate and moderate this relationship. Based on 232 employee-supervisor matched responses generated through a multi-source and multi-wave survey of 84 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Pakistan, our multilevel analysis (...) found that ethics-oriented HRM systems relate negatively to employee DWB via the mediation of perceptual and reflective moral attentiveness. This indirect relationship is further moderated by two societal-inequality induced factors – employee gender and income level – such that the indirect effects of ethics-oriented HRM systems on DWB through perceptual and reflective moral attentiveness are stronger among women and lower-income employees. (shrink)

This is an explorative work on teaching. The understanding of teaching that I use in my work is that teaching is action, it happens in the present – here and now. So, while teaching refers to shorter timespans, education in this understanding refers to timespans that are of a longer duration, meaning education is communication between generations. The notion of teaching I explore draw from experiences, for my own part between nature, dog and human. These are experiences of sensing where (...) one flows through and interconnects with others, so that boundaries are difficult to discern, and hence boundaries are not the point, but rather how sensing bodies and ‘movements between’ create experiences that are constitutive of who we become both as dog and human, in/with nature. Here I am not referring this to learning, as is usual in the equation “teaching and learning”. This does not mean learning is irrelevant, but rather that it is such an encompassing concept I cannot deal with it satisfactorily in this article. Also, I go beyond what is commonly understood as learning, in terms of making a change in someone’s cognitive or emotional structures. This article explores the kind of experiences our sensing body furnish us with and how these transfer to memory, in the here and now bodies sense, and how this creates memories. I argue this is especially important to recognize in teaching, but seldom addressed. I suggest we pay more attention to these experiences of sensing and how it becomes part of individual and collective memories. To me this is a vital and integral part in all teaching, in the present. (shrink)

Not to fear distraction by (what Levinas dismisses as) “underground passages” is an overhuman pressure placed by Benjamin on the philosophic. The philosophic removes us as much as possible not only from mythic reassurances but also from mythic fears. Wisdom involves “friendliness” that is provided at times and places that are most difficult. Agamben defines philosophy as “nonpredicative” friendship. For Benjamin’s Kafka, philosophy as friendliness is no escape from representation and conceptualization but is an attempt to consider representation and conceptualization (...) as emerging from distracting and distorting physicality that does not entirely manifest itself. Philosophy as friendliness must be willing to lend attention to anything, for everything belongs to the unincorporable physicality on behalf of which this friendliness is anxious to offset mythic constraint. (shrink)

Customer injustice has received considerable attention in the field of organizational behavior because it generates a variety of negative outcomes. Among possible negative consequences, customer-directed sabotage is the most common reaction, which impacts individuals’ well-being and the prosperity of organizations. To minimize such negative consequences, researchers have sought to identify boundary conditions that could potentially attenuate the occurrence of customer-directed sabotage. In this study, we explore potential attenuation effects of emotional stability and attentiveness on the customer injustice–sabotage linkage. The (...) results showed emotional stability and attentiveness moderate the relationship between customer injustice and customer-directed sabotage. Specifically, the representatives with higher emotional stability or higher attentiveness are less likely to engage in customer-directed sabotage when they experience customer injustice. Moreover, there is a three-way interaction among daily customer injustice, emotional stability, and attentiveness that predicts daily customer-directed sabotage. Theoretical and practical contributions, limitations, and directions for future development are also discussed. (shrink)

Translations, whether in the form of text, illustration, or interpretive analysis, served knowledge-making in multiple ways. It offered a refuge, severed contexts, and concealed the various workers that created it. Over the course of the seventeenth century, European naturalists in Istanbul, such as Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658–1730), procured illustrations of Ottoman nature as fundamental resources to identify, collect, and compare indigenous plants and newly bred varieties. Despite maintaining an actual mediation for cross-cultural interactions, these sources of virtual communication remain largely (...) forgotten in modern scholarship. This article argues that this curious yet invisible corpus was not a nonagentive medium in an alienated leisure of a gentleman-scholar; instead, these illustrations were designed to call upon the viewer’s constant attention in self-motivated scientific labor. Such handy tools responded and contributed to early modern scholars’ modes of working, and in exchange they determined these sources’ own function, position, and visibility – either as a by-product or as a derivative. It is therefore only when integrated into the labor history of science that the degrees of invisibility pertaining to both Ottoman nature studies and self-directed labor can come into a granular view. (shrink)

Attention has been studied in cognitive psychology for more than half a century, but until recently it was largely neglected in philosophy. Now, however, attention has been recognized by philosophers of mind as having an important role to play in our theories of consciousness and of cognition. At the same time, several recent developments in psychology have led psychologists to foundational questions about the nature of attention and its implementation in the brain. As a result there has been a convergence (...) of interest in fundamental questions about attention. This volume presents the latest thinking from the philosophers and psychologists who are working at the interface between these two disciplines. Its fourteen chapters contain detailed philosophical and scientific arguments about the nature and mechanisms of attention; the relationship between attention and consciousness; the role of attention in explaining reference, rational thought, and the control of action; the fundamental metaphysical status of attention, and the details of its implementation in the brain. These contributions combine ideas from phenomenology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind to further our understanding of this centrally important mental phenomenon, and to bring to light the foundational questions that any satisfactory theory of attention will need to address. (from OUP website). (shrink)

Jonardon Ganeri presents a radically reoriented account of mind, to which attention is the key. It is attention, not self, that explains the experiential and normative situatedness of humans in the world. Ganeri draws together three disciplines: analytic philosophy and phenomenology, cognitive science and psychology, and Buddhist thought.

A systematic overview and assessment of different empirical and philosophical aspects of attention.

Joint attention occurs when two (or more) individuals attend together to some object. It has been identified by psychologists as an early form of our joint engagement, and is thought to provide us with an understanding of other minds that is basic in that sophisticated conceptual resources are not involved. Accordingly, it has also attracted the interest of philosophers. Moreover, a very recent trend in the psychological and philosophical literature on joint attention consists of developing the suggestion that it holds (...) partially in virtue of communication: it is because we share our thoughts or feelings about an object that our individual attention becomes joint. This paper unpacks the communicative suggestion in a way that accounts for joint attention's basicness. (shrink)

Joint attention customarily refers to the coordinated focus of attention between two or more individuals on a common object or event, where it is mutually “open” to all attenders that they are so engaged. We identify two broad approaches to analyse joint attention, one in terms of cognitive notions like common knowledge and common awareness, and one according to which joint attention is fundamentally a primitive phenomenon of sensory experience. John Campbell’s relational theory is a prominent representative of the latter (...) approach, and the main focus of this paper. We argue that Campbell’s theory is problematic for a variety of reasons, through which runs a common thread: most of the problems that the theory is faced with arise from the relational view of perception that he endorses, and, more generally, they suggest that perceptual experience is not sufficient for an analysis of joint attention. (shrink)

This chapter argues that attention is a distinctive mode of consciousness, which plays an essential functional role in making information accessible for use in the rational control of thought and action. The main line of argument can be stated quite simply. Attention is what makes information fully accessible for use in the rational control of thought and action. But what makes information fully accessible for use in the rational control of thought and action is a distinctive mode of consciousness. Therefore, (...) attention is a distinctive mode of consciousness. In a slogan: attention is rational-access consciousness. (shrink)

Much of recent philosophy of perception is oriented towards accounting for the phenomenal character of perception—what it is like to perceive—in a non-mentalistic way—that is, without appealing to mental objects or mental qualities. In opposition to such views, I claim that the phenomenal character of perception of a red round object cannot be explained by or reduced to direct awareness of the object, its redness and roundness—or representation of such objects and qualities. Qualities of perception that are not captured by (...) what one is directly aware of or by representational content are instances of what Gilbert Harman has called “mental paint” (Block, 1990; Harman, 1990). The claim of this paper is that empirical facts about attention point in the direction of mental paint. The argument starts with the claim (later modified) that when one moves one's attention around a scene while keeping one's eyes fixed, the phenomenology of perception can change in ways that do not reflect which qualities of objects one is directly aware of or the way the world is represented to be. These changes in the phenomenology of perception cannot be accounted for in terms of awareness of or representation of the focus of attention because they manifest themselves in experience as differences in apparent contrast, apparent color saturation, apparent size, apparent speed, apparent time of occurrence and other appearances. There is a way of coping with these phenomena in terms of vague contents, but vague contents cannot save direct realism or representationism because the kind of vagueness required clashes wth the phenomenology itself. (shrink)

Attention is described as a “scarce commodity” that is traded in “a marketplace.” This, it is further claimed, contributes to a “widespread sense of attentional crisis.” But is there really an attention market, and if so, what, if anything, is wrong with it? We defend the claim that there are markets in attention. We provide an account of such attention markets and use that account to address what is morally wrong with them. Our account draws on knowledge of how attention (...) works and what roles it plays in the mind. The attention market trades in an ability to influence our attention – somewhat (though not exactly) like the labor market trades in an ability to influence how we use our capacity for work. Specifically, the commodity it trades in is attentional landscaping potential, viz. the ability to systematically influence patterns of attention by changes to the sensory environment individuals are exposed to. Attention markets thus, we argue, commodify influence over a human capacity that plays a central role in shaping individual experience, agency, and belief formation. This feature of attention markets makes them ethically problematic. As markets in access to external influence, attention markets pose a special threat to individual autonomy and escape the classical liberal defense of free markets. Those who value autonomy should worry about the attention markets that exist today. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

I argue that perceptual content is always affected by the allocation of one’s attention. Perception attributes determinable and determinate properties to the perceived scene. Attention makes (or tries to make) our perceptual attribution of properties more determinate. Hence, a change in our attention changes the determinacy of the properties attributed to the perceived scene.

'Everyone knows what attention is’ according to William James. Much work on attention in psychology and neuroscience cites this famous phrase only to quickly dismiss it. But James is right about this: ‘attention’ was not introduced into psychology and neuroscience as a theoretical concept. I argue that we should therefore study attention with broadly the same methodology that David Marr has applied to the study of perception. By focusing more on Marr's Computational Level of analysis, we arrive at a unified (...) answer to the question of what attention is, what role it plays in the mind, and why organisms like us have that capacity. I propose a methodology for studying attention at Marr's Computational Level that optimizes in a three-dimensional space: it should capture core aspects of our first-person experience of attention, be explanatorily powerful in psychology and neuroscience, and fertile in an interdisciplinary context. I show how this methodology leads to what I call the priority structure account of attention. Attention is what organizes current information to make it more useful for the organism. We can identify it by four features. Attention, in this way, helps a cognitive system to integrate its informational state with its current motivational state. I describe how this account improves on alternatives and shows why attention is a useful concept in many disciplines and for connecting them. -/- This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Psychological Capacities Psychology > Attention Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science. (shrink)

Recommender systems are artificial intelligence technologies, deployed by online platforms, that model our individual preferences and direct our attention to content we’re likely to engage with. As the digital world has become increasingly saturated with information, we’ve become ever more reliant on these tools to efficiently allocate our attention. And our reliance on algorithmic recommendation may, in turn, reshape us as moral agents. While recommender systems could in principle enhance our moral agency by enabling us to cut through the information (...) saturation of the internet and focus on things that matter, as they’re currently designed and implemented they’re apt to interfere with our ability to attend appropriately to morally relevant factors. In order to analyze the distinctive moral problems algorithmic recommendation poses, we develop a framework for the ethics of attention and an account of judicious attention allocation as a moral skill. We then discuss empirical evidence suggesting that attentional moral skill can be thwarted and undermined in various ways by algorithmic recommendation and related affordances of online platforms, as well as economic and technical considerations that support this concern. Finally, we consider how emerging technologies might overcome the problems we identify. (shrink)

Wilderness experiences were celebrated by the Great Romantics, and figures such as Wordsworth and Thoreau emphasized the need to seek direct contact with the non-human world. Later deep ecologists accentuated the way in which wilderness experiences can spark moral epiphanies and lead to action on behalf of the natural environment. In recent years, psychological studies have manifested how the observations made by the Romantics, nature authors and deep ecologists apply to laypeople: contact with the wilderness does tend to lead to (...) epistemological, ontological and normative ‘epiphanies.’ This paper analyses four different umbrella terms with which to make sense of the content of wilderness experiences. First, mystical experience, peak experience and elevation are explored. Although all three offer promising models for explicating the nature of wilderness experiences, they also run the risk of reducing those experiences to sheer experiential hedonism.... (shrink)

In modern language models self-attention realizes, at the algorithmic level, what the quantum-mechanical Zeno operator expresses formally and what teleodynamic theory describes philosophically: the stabilization of evolving systems through continuous self-measurement. This paper argues that the Zeno operator, the teleodynamic operator, and the attention operator share a common structural grammar—a composition of free evolution and coherence projection. From this identification arises a unified model linking quantum measurement, semantic self-organization, and the emergent coherence of reflexive AI systems.

The selection of wanted from unwanted messages requires discriminatory mechanisms of as great a complexity as those in normal perception, as is indicated by behavioral evidence. The results of neurophysiology experiments on selective attention are compatible with this supposition. This presents a difficulty for Filter theory. Another mechanism is proposed, which assumes the existence of a shifting reference standard, which takes up the level of the most important arriving signal. The way such importance is determined in the system is further (...) described. Neurophysiological evidence relative to this postulation is discussed. (shrink)

In this book, Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haladjian consider the relationship between consciousness and attention. The cognitive mechanism of attention has often been compared to consciousness, because attention and consciousness appear to share similar qualities. But, Montemayor and Haladjian point out, attention is defined functionally, whereas consciousness is generally defined in terms of its phenomenal character without a clear functional purpose. They offer new insights and proposals about how best to understand and study the relationship between consciousness and attention by (...) examining their functional aspects. The book's ultimate conclusion is that consciousness and attention are largely dissociated. -/- Undertaking a rigorous analysis of current empirical and theoretical work on attention and consciousness, Montemayor and Haladjian propose a spectrum of dissociation—a framework that identifies the levels of dissociation between consciousness and attention—ranging from identity to full dissociation. They argue that conscious attention, the focusing of attention on the contents of awareness, is constituted by overlapping but distinct processes of consciousness and attention. Conscious attention, they claim, evolved after the basic forms of attention, increasing access to the richest kinds of cognitive contents. -/- Montemayor and Haladjian's goal is to help unify the study of consciousness and attention across the disciplines. A focused examination of conscious attention will, they believe, enable theoretical progress that will further our understanding of the human mind. (shrink)

Human attention has become a touchstone of widespread concern across the humanities, sciences, and broader culture in much of the world. The emergence of a new, heavily capitalized, and technologically sophisticated industry “commodifying” human attention (what has been called “human fracking”) has given rise to a transdisciplinary conversation about attentional problems. Philosophical analyses of attention take on special importance in the context of these new developments. Drawing on historical epistemology and the critical perspective of the history and philosophy of science, (...) this paper examines the major positions in contemporary philosophy that have staked accounts of human attention. Ultimately, this metaphilosophical analysis juxtaposes analytic and Continental approaches, and contends that much current philosophical work on human attention fails to take adequate account of the sublated genealogy of instrumentalizing/cybernetic scientific practices that have constituted attention as an object of inquiry across the twentieth century. The implications for forward-looking investigations are considered. (shrink)

It is now commonplace for politicians, other public officials and commentators, academics, and citizens more generally to bemoan levels of political incivility in contemporary liberal democracies and to advocate for more civil and productive forms of political discussion that seek to bridge fractured divides. Polarization and uncivil discourse are features of public life, features which are typically understood in terms of crises of talking and speaking rather than crises of civic listening. That said, in recent years, increasing attention has been (...) paid to the act of listening as a civic endeavor. This chapter explores civic listening in relation to the virtue of civility, arguing that sustained attentiveness as a form of civic listening is an important component of civility and is a necessary component of civility as virtue. Some thoughts about educating sustained attentiveness in high schools are also offered. (shrink)

I propose a new argument showing that conscious vision sometimes depends constitutively on conscious attention. I criticise traditional arguments for this constitutive connection, on the basis that they fail adequately to dissociate evidence about visual consciousness from evidence about attention. On the same basis, I criticise Ned Block's recent counterargument that conscious vision is independent of one sort of attention (‘cognitive access'). Block appears to achieve the dissociation only because he underestimates the indeterminacy of visual consciousness. I then appeal to (...) empirical work on the interaction between visual indeterminacy and attention, to argue for the constitutive connection. (shrink)

In phenomenology, attention refers to the structuring of the experiential field into a foreground and a background. There are different phenomenological accounts for what brings about this structure, which are discussed in this entry.

Some psychological phenomena can be explained by identifying and describing the processes that constitute them. Others cannot be explained in that way. In Attention is Cognitive Unison Christopher Mole gives a precise account of the metaphysical difference that divides these two categories and shows that, when current psychologists attempt to explain attention, they assign it to the wrong one. Having rejected the metaphysical approach taken by our existing theories of attention Mole then develops a new theory. According to this theory (...) the question of whether someone is paying attention is not settled by the facts about which processes are taking place. It is settled by the facts about whether the processes that serve that person's task-- whichever processes those happen to be--are processes that operate in unison. This theory gives us a new account of the problems that have dogged debates about the psychology of attention since the middle of the twentieth century. It also gives us a new way to understand the explanatory importance of cognitive psychology's empirical findings. The book as whole shows that metaphysical questions have a foundational role to play in the explanatory project of cognitive psychology. This volume is of interest to anyone engaged in current debates in the philosophy of mind and perception, and in cognitive science generally. (shrink)

According to commonsense psychology, one is conscious of everything that one pays attention to, but one does not pay attention to all the things that one is conscious of. Recent lines of research purport to show that commonsense is mistaken on both of these points: Mack and Rock (1998) tell us that attention is necessary for consciousness, while Kentridge and Heywood (2001) claim that consciousness is not necessary for attention. If these lines of research were successful they would have important (...) implications regarding the prospects of using attention research to inform us about consciousness. The present essay shows that these lines of research are not successful, and that the commonsense picture of the relationship between attention and consciousness can be. (shrink)

The question of whether perception is encapsulated from cognition has been a major topic in the study of perception in the past decade. One locus of debate concerns the role of attention. Some theorists argue that attention is a vehicle for widespread violations of encapsulation; others argue that certain forms of cognitively driven attention are compatible with encapsulation, especially if attention only modulates inputs. This paper argues for an extreme thesis: no effect of attention, whether on the inputs to perception (...) or on perceptual processing itself, constitutes a violation of the encapsulation of perception. (shrink)