Attention Is Cognitive Unison

Christopher Mole is Associate Professor in Philosophy at University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

1. Highlights of a Difficult History ; 1.1 The Preliminary Identification of Our Topic ; 1.2 Three Approaches ; 1.3 Bradley's Protest ; 1.4 James's Disjunctive Theory ; 1.5 The Source of Bradley's Dissatisfaction ; 1.6 Behaviourism and After ; 1.7 Heirs of Bradley in the Twentieth Century ; 2. The Underlying Metaphysical Issue ; 2.1 Explanatory Tactics ; 2.2 The Basic Distinction ; 2.3 Metaphysical Categories and Taxonomies ; 2.4 Adverbialism, Multiple Realizability, and Natural Kinds ; 2.5 Adverbialism and Levels of Explanation ; 2.6 Taxonomies and Supervenience Relations ; 3. Rejecting the Process First View ; 3.1 Supervenience-Failure ; 3.2 The Modal Commitments of The Process-First View ; 3.3 The Interference Argument - A Putative Problem for Adverbialist Accounts ; 3.4 Conclusion ; 4. Cognitive Unison ; 4.1 Introduction ; 4.2 The Problem with Attitude Based Adverbialism ; 4.3 Gilbert Ryle and Alan White ; 4.4 White's Argument Against Disposition-Based Adverbialism ; 4.5 The Cognitive Unison Theory ; 4.6 Tasks ; 4.7 Cognitive Processes ; 4.8 Potential Service of a Task ; 4.9 Superordinate Tasks ; 4.10 Some Features of the Theory ; 4.11 Divided Attention ; 4.12 Degrees of Attention and Merely Partial Attention ; 4.13 Summary ; 5. The Causal Life of Attention ; 5.1 Mental Causation ; 5.2 How to Respond to Mental Causation Objections ; 5.3 The Causal Role of Attention ; 5.4 Attention as an enabling condition ; 5.5 Counterfactuals ; 5.6 The Causal Relevance of Attention per se ; 5.7 Counterfactuals and Causally Relevant Properties ; 5.8 Objections to Counterfactual Analysis of Causation and of Causal Relevance ; 5.9 The Extrinsicness of Unison ; 5.10 The Privative Character of Unison and The Problem of Absence Causation ; 5.11 Causal Exclusion ; 5.12 Summary ; 6. Consequences for Cognitive Psychology ; 6.1 Psychology and Metaphysics ; 6.2 The Metaphysical Commitments of the Process-Identifying Project ; 6.3 The Diverse Explanatory Construals of Current Psychological Results ; 6.4 Reasons for Deflation ; 6.5 Inductively Unreliable Properties ; 6.6 Questions Without Answers ; 6.7 The Positive Payoff ; 7. Philosophical Work for The Theory of Attention ; 7.1 Putting Attention to Philosophical Work ; 7.2 Attention and Reference ; 7.3 Attention and Consciousness ; 7.4 Prospects for Optimism ; Notes ; References