According to one tradition in philosophical reflection on attention, selectively attending to a perceived object and its features is a means for answering questions about the world around us. For example, Cedric Evans defined what he called ‘interrogative attention’ as ‘the attention we pay to an object in order to enlarge our knowledge.’ Again, John Campbell has suggested that attending to a perceived object amounts to an ‘experiential highlighting’ that alters the ‘functional role of one’s experience': for example, it puts one in the position to answer questions about the object. In this lecture I want to articulate a version of the ‘interrogative view' of attention and in turn bring it to bear on a fundamental issue in contemporary epistemology. Is perceptual knowledge a matter of forming rational beliefs on the basis of perceptual experience, as John McDowell holds? Or is such knowledge ‘direct’ in the sense that there is nothing that serves as our reason for belief, as Barry Stroud has argued (‘belief doesn’t come into it’)? I will suggest that the role of attention in perceptual knowledge holds the key to resolving that disagreement.
Johannes Roessler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He holds an MA from Tübingen University and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. He has published articles on issues in epistemology and the philosophy of mind and action, and is currently working on a book on perceptual knowledge. He has co-edited four volumes published by OUP, most recently Perceptual Knowledge and Self-Awareness (with A. Giananti and G. Soldati).