Visual prominence and representationalism

Abstract

A common objection to representationalism is that a representationalist view of phenomenal character cannot accommodate the effects that shifts in covert attention have on visual phenomenology: covert attention can make items more visually prominent than they would otherwise be without altering the content of visual experience. Recent empirical work on attention casts doubt on previous attempts to advance this type of objection to representationalism and it also points the way to an alternative development of the objection.

Attention Is Amplification, Not Selection

“…It would go like this: if my vision is not perfect, then putting on glasses also has an amplificatory effect. But putting on glasses is blatantly not attention (see, for example,Watzl [2011b];Wu [2014], Section 4.4;Ganson and Bronner [2013] for versions of this argument). This objection misses the mark: according to our account, attention plays a very specific role by amplifying the input of certain…”

Perceptual content is indexed to attention

“…In one study that has received considerable philosophical discussion ; see also Block 2010;Speaks 2011;Stazicker 2011a, b;Wu 2011;Ganson and Bronner 2013;Watzl 2014a, forthcoming), covert attention was shown to boost perceived contrast by 3-6 % (see Fig. 2).…”

“…Pure representationalists are committed to the claim that there can be no change in phenomenal content without a change in representational content. 2 The trouble is that shifting attention sometimes seems to bring about a change in phenomenal content without a change in representational content (Chalmers 2004;Nickel 2007;Speaks 2010;Block 2010;Wu 2011;Ganson and Bronner 2013). So, the effect of attention on perception seems to force us either to reject representationalism altogether, or to adopt an impure variant, on which phenomenal facts supervene on more than just facts about content.…”

“…A third option is to defend a version of impure representationalism Ganson and Bronner (2013). have explored one version of impure representationalism which they call quasi-representationalism.…”

Perceptual Experience and Degrees of Belief

“…10 As an example, consider experiments involving a 'Gabor Patch', seen only in one's peripheral vision, looking more or less blurry and indeterminate depending on the focus of one's cognitive attention. See Gobell and Carrasco (2005) and Yeshurun and Carrasco (2008) for a review of the empirical work; see Stazicker (2011), Nanay (2010), Ganson and Bronner (2013) for philosophical interpretation of these results in terms of determinacy of representational content. phenomenal unclarity by appeal to the indeterminacy of perceptual content.…”