Examiner PhD dissertation EHESS, Paris - Attending: a defence of adverbialism in the philosophy of attention (French: Accorder son attention : l'unisson cognitif comme modèle des phénomènes attentionnels)

Description

ABSTRACT The dissertation focuses on the problem of attention in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and cognitive neurosciences. On the one hand, as William James put it, “everyone knows what attention is”; on the other hand, there is not one mental operation or computational function that could be clearly matched to attentional phenomena. The notion of attention seems essential to our self-understanding; yet it cannot be identified with any given cognitive process. This problem arises because we take attention to be a kind of process, but it should be considered an adverbial phenomenon: attention is a manner of doing something (i.e. doing it attentively). I share Christopher Mole’s adverbialist view, according to which attention is cognitive unison: attention is the unison of neural mechanisms operating in the service of some cognitive task. I defend this view by showing that the psychiatric practice of cognitive remediation does implicitly take attention to be an adverbial phenomenon. I show that the cognitive unison model can be applied to perception to explain perceptual attention and can be neatly articulated with direct realism. I criticize Wayne Wu’s model of attention as “selection-for-action”, which shares many features of Christopher Mole’s model but provides a process-based account of attention. Finally, I show that the adverbialist model of cognitive unison meets the requirements that are expected from the notion of attention in aesthetics and in moral and political philosophy.

Period	2021 Dec 14
Examinee/Supervised person	Anselin Gautier
Examination/Supervision held at	EHESS Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Degree of Recognition	International