Attention, Objects, and Aims
We normally think of attention as a relationship between a person and an object. If you are attending, you're attending to something, that is, to some thing -- a noise, a conversation, an apple.
First problem case: Macbeth hallucinates a dagger. I see a mirage. There is, of course, no dagger and no pool of water. So what thing, what object, do I stand in relation to, as the target of my attention? Some non-existent thing? Some mental thing (an idea, an experience)? If the latter, does it follow that I can't always tell whether my attention is directed outward to the world or inward, as it were, to my own mind? That would be strange.
Not a fatal objection, surely, to an "objectual model" (let's call it) of attention. Defenders of that view will have their resources. But why not, instead, jettison the objectual model and regard attention as the dedication of a certain kind of resource (what we might call "central cognitive resources") to a particular aim or goal? The aim of visual attention is the same in both the mirage case and the case of seeing an ordinary pool of water. The aim is to (for example) determine whether there's water over there, or whether this is really a mirage, or to estimate how long before the car hits the puddle. The mirage case and the visual case can be treated in the same way, without the aid of some ghostly, invented object for me to stand in an attentional relation to.
Consider also other sorts of attention-consuming tasks. Research psychologists have fixated on visual attention (and to some extent auditory attention) almost exclusively in recent decades, but in the early days of introspective psychology people spoke also of "intellectual attention". When you're thinking hard about a math puzzle or when you're contemplating the best route to grandma's house in rush hour, there's a perfectly legitimate sense in which you are devoting (non-sensory) attention to these tasks. Both kinds of tasks consume central cognitive resources. You can't do either very well while also quickly adding a column of numbers or while focusing on a difficult visual task.
But what are the objects I stand in relation to in intellectual attention? The route to grandma's house? Numbers? (What are numbers, anyway?) What if I'm thinking about unicorns? Better to say that I'm trying to do things. Attention is devoted to tasks, not objects. Or consider heavy exercise, holding one's eyes still, and other acts of self control. These tasks, too, consume attentional resources; yet it's not always clear that I am attending to objects (my own body, maybe?) in doing them.
So why do I care about this? Mainly because I think introspection is a species of attention, and that philosophers and psychologists often get introspection wrong because they work with too objectual a model of attention. But more on that in a future post....
(Thanks to Justin Fisher, by the way, for conversation on this point last Friday.)