Locke on attention

ABSTRACT

Locke’s remarks about attention have not received a great deal of attention from commentators. In Section 1, I make the case that attention plays an important role in his philosophy. In Section 2, I describe and discuss five Lockean claims about attention. In Section 3, I explore Locke’s views about attention in relation to his account of sense perception. He thinks that we attend to objects by attending to ideas, and I argue that he treats sensory ideas as transparent in a particular sense. In Section 4, I raise the worry that some of Locke’s remarks about attention seem at odds with his doctrine of the transparency of the mind. I offer two ways of resolving the problem, and suggest that they are parts of a single story.

KEYWORDS:

• Locke
• attention
• ideas
• transparency
• abstraction

Notes

1 The role of attention in the making of abstract ideas has received a good deal of attention from commentators, and it has also been disputed. In claiming that Locke thinks that selective attention plays a key role in the making of abstract ideas, I am siding with Winkler (Berkeley, 41) and Ayers (Locke, 1:250-1), among others. Those who deny that Locke gives attention this role include Walmsley (‘Locke on Abstraction’, ‘The Development of Lockean Abstraction’) and Ott (Locke’s Philosophy of Language, 54–68). For a fuller defense of my reading of Locke on abstraction, see Stuart (‘Lockean Operations’).

2 For a defense of this claim, see Stuart (Locke’s Metaphysics, §25).

3 When Locke says that ‘having Ideas, and Perception [are] the same thing’ (2.1.9, 108), he is using the phrase ‘having Ideas’ in an episodic sense. He also allows that we can be said to have the ideas stored in our memories, even when we are not perceiving them. To have an idea in this dispositional sense is to have had a certain perception before, and to possess the power to revive it along with the perception that one has had it before (2.10.2, 150).

4 This is his considered position about volition, the one he puts forward in the second and later editions of the Essay. In the first edition, he vacillates between this and a different conception of volition (see my Locke’s Metaphysics, §55). Many volitionists would deny that forbearances involve volitions to not-do, but that does seem to be Locke's view (for evidence of this, see my Locke’s Metaphysics, §59).

5 A cut's being painful is a consequence of God's having annexed ‘the Idea of Pain to the motion of a piece of Steel dividing our Flesh’ (2.8.13, 136-7). Fire is called painful because it has ‘the power of producing in us the Idea of pain’ (2.31.2, 375).

6 In reading Locke as advocating a representative theory of sense perception, I side with Chappell (‘Locke’s Theory of Ideas’), Bennett (Learning from Six Philosophers, 2:1), Bolton (‘Locke on the Semantic’), Newman (‘Locke on Sensitive Knowledge’) and Rickless (2014, 17), among others. Dissenters include Yolton (Perceptual Acquaintance, 88-94), Lennon (‘Through a Glass Darkly’) and Lowe (Locke, 45).

7 In these passages, Locke is speaking of ideas that are in the mind in the episodic sense, not of ideas stored in memory.