Attention and Perceptual Consciousness Boston Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference on Consciousness

Chalmers (2004), Wu (2010), and Block (2010) have independently argued that the effect of attention on the content of perception raises a challenge for representationalism. Covert shifts of attention seem to involve a change in the phenomenal character of perception, without a corresponding change in representational content. In this paper, I show that the challenge fails because the arguments provided do not rule out a change in representational content. I argue that the strongest version of the challenge dissolves once we accept that there can be different ways of veridically representing the same object in perception. I end by drawing a new moral for representationalism. Research on attention shows that we must reconsider the relationship between the mind and the world, and provide an account on which the content of perception is partly a function of attention.