Christopher Mole

The set of entities that serves as the domain for our discourse about the mind is metaphysically heterogenous. It includes processes, events, properties, modes, and states. In the latter part of the twentieth century, philosophers started to suppose that a philosophical theory of the mind should be primarily concerned with the explanation of mental states. Those states could then be mentioned in the explanations that would need to be given for mental entities of other sorts. If, for example, we had a prior explanation of belief states, those states could figure in our subsequent explanation of inferences: inferences, on this approach, are to be identified with certain processes of belief revision. This states-first approach was not favoured by earlier theorists of the mind, who tended to suppose that mental events and processes are explanatorily more basic than mental states. The current states-first approach faces insuperable difficulties, which the earlier approach avoids.

This essay focuses on three features of attention: (1) that it can be manifested in behaviour; (2) that it improves one’s epistemic position vis-à-vis one’s activities; and (3) that attentive performance is experienced as single-minded concentration. I show that views according to which there is a particular process of attention struggle to accommodate all three of these features, and that the most natural alternative to these process-based views is a view that treats attention as an adverbial phenomenon analogous to unison.

The moral success or failure of our conduct is sometimes determined by the rationality of our practical decision making, and sometimes by the continence with which we act on the decisions that we have made. Both factors depend on the things that we find salient. And rather than making some culpable error in reasoning, or failing to resist some temptation, we often behave poorly just because some important aspect of the situation never became salient to us. We might also act well only because the temptations that would have deterred us from doing so remained in the unattended background of our consciousness. These contributions of salience disappear from view if we model our practical reasoning in decision-theoretic terms. The writers who have emphasised their importance have typically done so in the course of literary writings, rather than philosophical ones. They have suggested that an agent's role in shaping which things will be salient to them is most clearly seen in the practice of prayer. Following some remarks of Iris Murdoch, and drawing on some results from experimental psychology, this paper considers a way in which this suggestion might be naturalised to a secular world view.