Conceptualizing intellectual attention

Miscommunicating about attention: A case study

Distinguishing between perceptual attention and intellectual attention gives us additional resources to help us understand when theorists studying attention are actually miscommunicating with each other rather than genuinely disagreeing with each other. Expanding our resources to deal with that sort of problem is useful for any area in philosophy, but especially critical for the study of attention. Psychologists and philosophers have argued that miscommunication due to unacknowledged, different ways of understanding “attention” has been a particular problem with the study of attention for almost as long as attention has been an object of psychological and philosophical inquiry (see, e.g., Anderson, 2011).

To demonstrate how only distinguishing between perceptual and intellectual attention can help us resolve this kind of miscommunication, I will now analyze and resolve an apparent disagreement between Christopher Mole (2008) and Arien Mack and Irvin Rock (1998). Mole says that Mack and Rock argue for the thesis that we can perceptually attend to something without being perceptually conscious of it. But I will argue that in the passages Mole cites, Mack and Rock argue for a much less contentious thesis: the thesis that we can intellectually attend to something without being perceptually conscious of it. Their dispute is one that could have been avoided, had the concept of intellectual attention been closer at hand in Mole’s interpretation of Mack and Rock.

Note that my argument in this section is purely interpretative: I don’t mean to say that Mack and Rock are right about the relationship between attention and consciousness, and instead just intend to establish one limited conclusion: that on one occasion when they were making an argument about intellectual attention, Mole believed that they were making an argument about perceptual attention instead. ²

Introducing the miscommunication

This miscommunication occurs in Mole’s article “Attention and Consciousness” (2008), where he addresses arguments against what he calls the common-sense picture of the relationship between perceptual attention and perceptual consciousness. This common-sense picture, Mole argues, is motivated by reflections on our everyday experiences. Here is how Mole puts those reflections:

In our everyday encounter with the mental we take the relationship between attention and consciousness to be a close one. We catch someone’s attention as a way to influence what he is conscious of, and it is by introducing something into his field of consciousness that we catch his attention… The fact that we expect attention and consciousness to behave in these ways is made intelligible if we understand common-sense psychology to treat paying attention to something as a way of being conscious of that thing: a way that locates the thing attended in the foreground of experience. According to common-sense psychology, then, attention requires consciousness. (2008, pp. 88–89)

Mole’s claim that attention causes something to be located in the “foreground” of conscious experience is worth elaborating on a bit. The claim in question is the thesis that consciously attending to an object causes our experience of that object to become foregrounded (or more vivid, or more central) in our fields of consciousness. Mole (2008) argues that this claim is a part of the folk theory of attention and consciousness.

Here’s an explanation of what it means for something to be made more foregrounded, or more vivid, or more central in consciousness. Consider Figure 1 below:

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Three crosses.

There are (at least) two different ways to see this image. While directing your gaze at the centre cross, you can focus your visual attention on the cross on the left, in which case the cross on the left seems to be in the foreground of your consciousness and the cross on the right seems to be in the background of your consciousness. Alternatively, while directing your gaze at the centre cross, you can focus your visual attention on the cross on the right, in which case the cross on the right is in the foreground of your consciousness and the cross on the left is in the background of your consciousness. Mole’s claim is that, according to the common-sense view of visual attention and visual consciousness, shifts in visual attention cause changes in what is in the foreground of visual consciousness.

Intellectual attention as “thinking”

Daniel Stoljar, in his paper “The Argument from Diaphanousness” (2004), argues that intellectual attention to an object is only thinking about that object. ⁷ He argues that we should accept his definition only because it makes sense of the following two ordinary uses of the word “attention”: (a) “let us now attend to the second flaw of the argument” and (b) “the program made us attend even more than we had before to the effects of salination on the nation’s rivers.”

As Stoljar observes, “attend to,” in the above two sentences, might only mean “think about” (2004, p. 374). Making sense of these ordinary-language claims does not obviously require positing that intellectual attention to an object is anything over and above thought about an object.

Should our theory of attention really be driven by linguistic considerations such as these? Perhaps not—I will return to this presumption of Stoljar’s below. But I’ll argue that even if our theory should be driven by such considerations, Stoljar’s theory should not be accepted. Consider these two examples of ordinary thought and talk about attention:

According to case (a), the speaker does not only consider hazards—the speaker attentively considers hazards. Case (b), similarly, refers to attentive thought about armed uprisings—not mere thought about them. What (a) and (b) show us is that the folk notion of thought allows for (at least) two modes of thought: the attentive way of thinking and the inattentive way of thinking. On such a view, when we think about an object we do sometimes think attentively—but we might just as readily engage in inattentive thought about the object. Consider, to illustrate this point, Christopher Mole’s description of a devoted but tired scholar:

the devoted scholar who has spent too long at his desk. His reading of the book before him is prompted by genuine interest, but having spent the whole day trying to ignore the pangs of hunger, the children in the next room, and the radio that is playing downstairs, he is no longer able to concentrate. His reading is prompted by interest, but it is not attentive. (2011, pp. 48–49)

Mole’s description of the case is apt: there is an inattentive mode of thought as well as an attentive mode of thought, and the scholar is failing to engage in the attentive mode of thought. What all this shows is that Stoljar’s (2004) definition of intellectual attention is at odds with the folk notions of thought and attention. But his claim was that we should accept his definition of intellectual attention because it was the folk notion of intellectual attention! So even if we grant the (contentious) assumption that we should accept a definition of intellectual attention because it was the folk notion of intellectual attention, Stoljar’s argument is unsuccessful. There are simply more ordinary uses of “attend” than he considers. ⁸

Lastly, a remark about that contentious assumption made by Stoljar (2004), according to which considerations about ordinary thought and talk about attention should guide our theory of attention: while I do not think that our theory of attention must, ultimately, be consistent with every pronouncement of ordinary thought and talk about attention, I do think that ordinary thought and talk about attention constitute the starting point for our theorizing. And coming up with a definition of attention is one of the first things we do after we start. But regardless of whether this way of thinking about the relationship between ordinary and theoretical talk about attention is ultimately tenable, Stoljar’s proposal about how to understand intellectual attention should be rejected.

Intellectual attention as “conscious thinking”

Ian Phillips (2012), following Michael Martin (1997), argues that what distinguishes intellectual attention from perceptual attention is that the former is simply our stream of conscious thought, while the latter is a modification of our streams of conscious perception. ⁹ This way of distinguishing between perceptual attention and intellectual attention can be used to generate a definition of intellectual attention—“conscious thought”. ¹⁰

This definition faces a methodological problem. Martin’s and Phillips’s definition of intellectual attention puts us in a poor position to begin a combination of a “conceptual inquiry” and a “descriptive inquiry” into the nature of intellectual attention—what I will call a “blended inquiry”. ¹¹ First I’ll discuss the distinction between conceptual inquiries and descriptive inquiries, and then I will explain why their definition of intellectual attention doesn’t help us to begin such a blended inquiry into the concept of intellectual attention.

First, we can distinguish between two kinds of conceptual inquiries. In the first kind, we try to figure out what the folk think the analysis of a concept is. In the second kind, an individual tries to figure out what her own analysis of the concept should be. In the former kind of conceptual inquiry, we try to come to understand how a given population of people understand a concept, while in the latter kind, we do things like use intuitions that an individual has about cases to guide us in forming our analysis. For a deeper discussion of this distinction between these two kinds of conceptual inquiry see, for example, Paul Grice’s discussion of the distinction between what he calls “Oxonian” and “Athenian” dialectic in his book Studies in the Ways of Words (1989, pp. 380–381). Unsurprisingly, “Oxonian” dialectic refers to the first kind of conceptual inquiry, “Athenian” the second.

Note that Stoljar’s (2004) inquiry into the concept of intellectual attention was something like a very quick conceptual inquiry of the first kind. However, as I have already shown, a more careful conceptual inquiry of the first kind does not actually yield his definition of intellectual attention. The folk analysis of “intellectual attention” must be more complex than Stoljar thinks it is.

Descriptive inquiries, by contrast, are inquiries that involve empirical investigation. Rather than making the analysis of a concept more complete through the methods we use to perform conceptual inquiries (e.g., reflective equilibrium), in a descriptive inquiry we make our analysis more complete by making empirical discoveries. The empirical discoveries in question would, of course, be discoveries about something other than what the folk think about the concept: otherwise we would be performing an Oxonian conceptual inquiry.

The successes of cognitive science have shown that it is fruitful to study mental processes using an interdisciplinary methodology. Our investigation of intellectual attention should therefore be informed (at least!) by both philosophy and psychology. Using the terms I have just introduced above, one might say that our inquiry into intellectual attention should be partly descriptive, because psychologists deepen our understanding of concepts by making empirical discoveries, and partly conceptual, because philosophers engage in conceptual inquiries (not to say that this is all philosophers do—philosophy admits of a wide variety of methodologies). The definition of intellectual attention that we adopt should, accordingly, be one that is well suited to being the starting point for such a blended inquiry into the concept of intellectual attention.

What makes a definition well suited to being the starting point for such an inquiry? Potentially many properties of the definition, but there are just two properties that I will keep in mind in this article. First, such a definition should be thick enough to allow us to properly get a grip on the phenomenon of intellectual attention, i.e., a definition that puts us in a position to identify the phenomenon in the world and to have substantive debates about its nature. Second, such a definition should also be thin enough to leave room for us to deepen our understanding of the phenomenon through engaging in philosophical and psychological work.

A problem with accepting Martin’s (1997) and Phillips’s (2012) definition of intellectual attention is that it appears to close off the investigation of an apparently substantive question. To use the terminology I just introduced, their definition is too thick. Consider the question of whether there could be such a thing as unconscious intellectual attention. Phillips’s and Martin’s definition of intellectual attention rules out the investigation of this question, because according to their definition, attention—both perceptual and intellectual—is always conscious. But there is currently a substantive debate about whether there can be unconscious attention, or whether attention is always conscious: see, for example, Kentridge (2011), Koch and Tsuchiya (2007), Norman, Heywood, and Kentridge (2013), and Mole (2014) for arguments that there is unconscious attention, and Mole (2008), Smithies (2011), and Watzl (2011) for arguments that there is only conscious attention. ¹² The mere existence of this dispute is compelling evidence that the question of whether there can be non-conscious intellectual attention should not be settled by our definition of intellectual attention. It should, instead, be settled through philosophical and psychological inquiry.

Two psychological conceptualizations of intellectual attention

Marvin Chun, Julie Golomb, and Nicholas Turk-Brown (2011) have proposed two methods of distinguishing intellectual from perceptual attention (they use the terms “external” and “internal” rather than “perceptual” and “intellectual”). One is based on control—they say that perceptual attention can be uncontrolled, which is what makes it distinct from intellectual attention (p. 83).

However, mind-wandering is a counterexample to this way of distinguishing intellectual attention from perceptual attention, and not an insignificant one, given the significant amount of time we spend mind-wandering in the average day. Here is how Zachary Irving and Evan Thompson (2018) describe the phenomenon of mind-wandering:

Experientially, we all know mind-wandering when we see it. On the commute home, a programmer’s thoughts drift away from the sights and sounds of the subway car. At first she imagines the chicken she is brining for dinner. She can almost taste the thyme and rosemary when, suddenly, a line of code pops into her head. She plays with the code for a while, and then, smiling, remembers a joke she heard today… and so on. (p. 88)

Mind-wandering is clearly something that involves intellectual attention, as the description above makes clear. The experience above is constituted, in part, by several shifts of intellectual attention, as the subject drifts from one line of thought to another. But the aptness of the term “drift” shows that these shifts in intellectual attention are best thought of as involuntary, and this clashes with the idea that we should conceptualize intellectual attention as the kind of attention which is mostly voluntary. there would be no genuine clash if these involuntary shifts of intellectual attention were relative rarities, of course. But as Irving (2016) notes, mind-wandering might occupy as many as half of our waking thoughts. So it is an ordinary kind of intellectual attention rather than a relative rarity.

Here is the second proposal that Chun et al. (2011) make about defining intellectual attention:

External attention refers to the selection and modulation of sensory information, as it initially comes into the mind, generally in a modality-specific representation and often with episodic tags for spatial locations and points in time. This sensory information can be organized by features or into objects, which can themselves be targets of external attention. Another way to think of external attention is as perceptual attention. Internal attention refers to the selection and modulation of internally generated information, such as the contents of working memory, long-term memory, task sets, or response selection. (p. 77)

Defining intellectual attention as the attention that operates on internal “contents of selection” like thoughts and memories, rather than objects in the environment, has obvious appeal. When we think about examples like the above examples of mind-wandering, it’s clear that intellectual attention can involve our attention shifting from one topic to another, one plan to another, and so on.

However, our intellectual attention can also be targeted at the same sort of object as perceptual attention. When we make a careful judgment about an object we can see, we are engaging in a complicated process that involves both “internal” and “external” representations. By contrast, when we are wholly engaged in taking in the scene before us and not reflecting on it, we are engaged in a process which involves only “external” representations. But the judgment we make in cases like the former seem like clear cases of intellectual attention. Intellectual attention, therefore, should not be defined in terms of its lack of involvement with proximal, modality-specific representations. The core problem here is that Chun and colleagues have identified a feature that some examples of internal attention have, but not all of them.

Here is another way that core problem manifests. Above, Chun et al. (2011) suggest that what is distinctive about perceptual attention is that it deals with modality-specific representations, while what is distinctive about intellectual attention is that it deals with amodal representations. But consider the imagination, and the attention we pay in imagining with particular focus or care. Imaginative representations are modality specific—visual, auditory, tactile, etc.—and not amodal. But the imagination is clearly an intellectual rather than perceptual mode of engagement, and accordingly the attention we pay in imagining is intellectual rather than perceptual (When you imagined seeing a blue bird earlier in the day, it is not appropriate to say, “I perceived a blue bird earlier today.”). It might well be that intellectual attention is often associated with amodal representations, but it is not an essential feature of intellectual attention. Again, the core problem here is that Chun et al. have identified a feature that is had by some examples of intellectual attention, but not all of them.

Conclusion

With this article, I have tried to make two ideas clear: that it is important to keep the category of intellectual attention in mind and that currently we are without a good definition of intellectual attention. However, my goal has expressly not been to foster skepticism about the prospects for developing a definition, or even to foster skepticism about current studies of intellectual attention. I think that the term “intellectual attention” names a distinct phenomenon, which the scientific community will conceptualize more clearly as time goes on, and I think that many current studies of intellectual attention might manage to target the phenomenon, even without the best definition on hand. In gathering these remarks about intellectual attention and criticizing them, my goal has been to help stimulate discussion, and to move the scientific community towards a clearer and more complete way of conceptualizing intellectual attention.