Attention And Attentiveness: A Defence of The Argument for Adverbialism

ABSTRACT

In recent philosophical work on attention, several authors have employed versions of an argument purporting to show that attention is not identical to any cognitive process. Others have criticised this argument. This article addresses their various criticisms and shows the original argument to be a valid one. It also shows that this argument cannot be resisted by taking attention to be the disjunction of several processes, by taking it be a genus of process that is composed of various species, or by taking it to be a process-determinable, for which particular cognitive processes are determinates. The metaphysical position that most readily accommodates this argument’s conclusion is a version of adverbialism. It should be understood as making a claim about the essence of attention. Some of the confusions in this area are seen to originate in the difficulty of glossing such a claim in modal terms.

KEYWORDS:

• attention
• Adverbialism
• cognitive psychology

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Aaron Henry, for useful conversations, and for his work on related topics. I’m also grateful to the critics of adverbialism that this paper addresses, for their thoughtful engagement with my previous work on the topic. Thanks also to an anonymous referee for this journal, who provided extraordinarily helpful and astute comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 My own sympathies tend to favour plenitude, but there are difficulties that such a view brings with it, and I have tried to keep them off-stage in the present paper.

2 The rephrasing of this premise that Saran offers is rather cumbersome: ‘If being an instance of attention is a type of being a cognitive process of attention, then, for all events $x$ and $y$, if $x$ and $y$ instantiate all the same cognitive processes of attention, then if either one of them is an instance of attention, the other is too.’ (Saran 2018: 494)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. [Grant number 147841].