Attention and perceptual content

Extract

1. Introduction

Intentionalism is the view according to which the phenomenal character of an experience supervenes on the content of this experience. There are many versions of intentionalism, but I will focus on intentionalism about specific sense modalities: the claim that the phenomenal character of our perceptual experiences supervenes on the content of these perceptual experiences.¹

There has been a recent flood of counter-examples against intentionalism, which all, in one way or another, have to do with attention. They all have the same structure: two perceptual experiences have the same content, but they have different phenomenal character because our attention is different in the two cases. As David Chalmers says, ‘the most plausible potential cases of phenomenally distinct visual experiences with the same representational content involve differences in attention’ (Chalmers 2004: 161). The claim is that as in these examples two perceptual experiences have the same content and yet they have different phenomenal character, intentionalism is false: the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences does not supervene on the content of this experience.