Christopher Mole

According to commonsense psychology, one is conscious of everything that one pays attention to, but one does not pay attention to all the things that one is conscious of. Recent lines of research purport to show that commonsense is mistaken on both of these points: Mack and Rock (1998) tell us that attention is necessary for consciousness, while Kentridge and Heywood (2001) claim that consciousness is not necessary for attention. If these lines of research were successful they would have important implications regarding the prospects of using attention research to inform us about consciousness. The present essay shows that these lines of research are not successful, and that the commonsense picture of the relationship between attention and consciousness can be.

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.