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Unity in the Scientific Study of Intellectual Attention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2019

Mark Fortney Open the ORCID record for Mark Fortney [Opens in a new window]
Mark Fortney*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, The University of Toronto at Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

I argue that using information from a cognitive representation to guide the performance of a primary task is sufficient for intellectual attention, and that this account of attention is endorsed by scientists working in the refreshing, n-back, and retro-cue paradigms. I build on the work of Wayne Wu (2014), who developed a similarly motivated account, but for perceptual attention rather than intellectual attention. The way that I build on Wu’s account provides a principled way of responding to Watzl’s (2011a, 2017) challenge to Wu, according to which Wu’s style of account is unintuitively broad. The fact that I find unity in the practice of science puts us in a position to resist the claim that scientists studying intellectual attention are frequently failing to study the same thing.

Keywords

AttentionCognitionStimulus-Independent Thought
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , May 2020 , pp. 444 - 459
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Canadian Journal of Philosophy

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