Central to this book is the idea that in order to make a demonstrative reference I must attend to that to which I wish to refer. 1 At first blush, this suggestion seems obvious, commonsensical, even artfully naïve: how can I refer demonstratively to some thing or state of affairs unless I attend to it? The rub lies in explicating the claim, however apparently unremarkable, that an account of attentionand not of (say) intentionality-is the key to explaining a capacity for demonstrative reference. Explication follows two paths. One is to explain the notion of attention. Attending to some thing is typically a phenomenon of various kinds of sentient beings-thereby attention is usually regarded as a psychological function or state, and attending as a psychological act. The second path is to show that it is necessary for me to attend to an object (property, or state of affairs) to be able to refer demonstratively to it; similarly that it is necessary for my audience to attend to that very same object (property or state of affairs) to understand my thought and utterance successfully. Campbell notes that these two tasks have been expounded along different intellectual trajectories: for the most part accounts of attention have been provided by scientists working in the fields of psychology and cognitive science, hence the account of attention has often been formulated in terms of information processing and neurological modules or routines and sequences. In contrast, while the role of attention has been a minor issue for philosophy, the phenomenon of demonstrative thought has been critical to a major philosophical problem, that of reference (pp. 1-2).The resulting division of labour as a result of these separate explanatory paths has had significant and undesirable consequences, Campbell suggests. And surely he is right: one result is a poorly formulated role for top-down (and bottom-up) accounts of mental phenomena. Information-processing accounts, for example, have tended to dominate explanations of attention without critical justification for the appropriateness, power and limits of their explanatory role. Accounts of what it is to have knowledge of the reference of a demonstrative term (and perhaps, more speculatively, these might be extended to gestures) have often lacked psychological probity.
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