Adrienne Prettyman

Perception is widely regarded as exempt from moral assessment. Yet our ordinary practices of praise and blame suggest otherwise: we fault a dentist who fails to see a cavity, or a mechanic who cannot hear engine trouble. This paper develops and defends a theory of perceptual responsibility, according to which individuals are sometimes responsible for how they perceive. I argue that we are responsible for perceptual experiences because they can reflect our evaluative commitments, such as professional standards or moral values. Drawing on empirical work in psychology and neuroscience on perceptual learning, I show that perception can be deliberately shaped by training and, because of this, perception embodies our values. Perception belongs alongside belief, judgment, and other passive mental events for which we bear responsibility, with implications for understanding accountability for perception, perceptual bias, and uniquely perceptual harms.

This article defends a theory of diffuse attention and distinguishes it from focal attention. My view is motivated by evidence from psychology and neuroscience, which suggests that we can deploy visual selective attention in at least two ways: by focusing on a small number of items, or by diffusing attention over a group of items taken as a whole. I argue that diffuse attention is selective and can be object‐based. It enables a subject to select an object to guide behavior, albeit in a different way than focusing does.

In cases of identity crowding, a subject consciously sees items in a figure, even though they are presented too closely together for her to shift attention to each item. Block uses such cases to challenge the view that attention is necessary for consciousness. I argue that in identity crowding cases, subjects really do attend to the items. Specifically, they attend to the figure as a global object that contains the individual items as parts. To support this view, I provide evidence that attention can be directed to a global object or a local object. My response helps to defend the view that attention is necessary for conscious perception.

Attention seems to raise a problem for pure representationalism, the view that phenomenal content supervenes on representational content. The problem is that shifts of attention sometimes seem to bring about a change in phenomenal content without a change in representational content. I argue that the representationalist can meet this challenge, but that doing so requires a new view of the representational content of perception. On this new view, the representational content of perception is always relative to a way of attending. I call this the attention-indexed view of perceptual content.