Ege Yumuşak

Phenomenal salience is the experiential contribution of attention to how things seem; namely, the character of perceptual experience. Two aspects of phenomenal salience have been of interest to philosophers. The first is about the uniformity of the phenomenology of perceptual salience. This aspect concerns how salience organizes objects of experience. The second is about the psychological efficacy of phenomenal salience; namely, the faculty of attention's organization of one's perceptual states. These two points of interest correspond to different levels of analysis: the level of perceptual objects and the level of perceptual states. Consequently, accounts of phenomenal salience either distinguish conscious attention by a distinctive appearance or by a distinctive psychological effect, putting phenomenology and the order of perceptual objects, or the psychological function and the order of perceptual states, first. Both of these approaches take a snapshot approach to the analysis of mental life, placing priority at a level of organization (phenomenological or psychological) and analyzing differences in salience at that level by drawing synchronic or diachronic comparisons. Recently, however, philosophers have become interested in dynamic approaches, corresponding to forays into the study of inquiry in epistemology. In line with these trends in the literature, new accounts of phenomenal salience have been put forward. This article reviews the history and contemporary developments of work in phenomenal salience, and suggests new paths forward.

Consider a society with vast income and wealth inequality—a society that has an overclass that enjoys tremendous riches and an underclass that suffers from abject conditions. On a visit there, you gather that the public’s attention is consumed by the question, Should the government fund space tourism?. Despite your belief in free speech in the public sphere, you might think something is wrong with this particular issue consuming so much attention in such a society. Should members of the public not be calling attention to their failure to distribute resources fairly? Many would share this intuition. Yet, it is hard to specify what is wrong with putting the question Should the government fund space tourism? up for public debate. I attribute this hardship to political epistemologists’ undue focus on the doxastic realm and their subsequent blindness to the zetetic realm. Epistemically speaking, the standard view of political speech classifies questions as requests for information. I argue against this account of questions and present a way in which we can effectively undermine the idea that questions are epistemically innocent by appealing to an epistemic norm of relevance. While my account unmasks the epistemic defect of questions raised in the public sphere, it also shows the limitations of epistemic critique and occasions further theorizing on a moral theory of public relevance.

Serene Khader’s first book for a public audience packs philosophical rigor into a compulsive read. The book is primarily a call to action. In Khader’s view, the Dobbs decision’s final blow to abortion rights was unsurprising—not only because she was watching closely political developments but also because she was paying attention to how mainstream feminism had failed to evolve into an emancipatory movement. If mainstream feminists had seen their flaws, she tells her readers, they too would have seen that, in a sense, the Dobbs decision was inevitable.

Philosophers of mind and epistemology have studied extensively what beliefs are and what we ought to believe. Yet, we are guided toward many of our beliefs by our perspectives: cognitive structures that guide how we see and think. A chief role of ordinary perspective talk is to describe clashes between different points of view that arise when people interact. In this paper, I argue that the most developed extant account of perspectives, by Elisabeth Camp, lacks the resources to analyze interactions between perspectives. By contrast, my account of perspectives—the agenda view—better captures the kinds of differences and confrontations that underlie ordinary perspective talk by focusing on the ‘zetetic’ role of perspectives in directing inquiry.