Attention to Action: A Workshop with Wayne Wu

Wayne Wu is Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a leading figure in the philosophy of perception and action, and recently published a monograph on Attention (Routledge 2014).

At this workshop Wu will present his work on attention, action, and expertise in 3 workshops and in a public lecture. You will find details of each session below.

Wu will provide brief introductory remarks for each workshop. There is a discussant for each of the workshop sessions who will kick off the discussion with a short commentary. Wu will respond, followed by general discussion. Participants will be expected to have read the relevant readings for each of the workshops.

We will provide all participants with the relevant papers from Wayne Wu’s oeuvre, as well as some background material upon request (email to Alex Morgan at [email protected]
tuebingen.de).

Participation is free, but please register by sending an email to [email protected]
tuebingen.de. Please include your status and institutional affiliation when registering.


ATTENTION TO ACTION PROGRAM
(Detailed program + abstracts below)
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WORKSHOP 1 (Monday, June 23, 3-6pm) - 'What is Attention?’
Discussant: Chiara Brozzo

WORKSHOP 2 (Tuesday, June 24, 12pm-3pm) - 'Agency and Expertise’
Discussant: Gregor Hochstetter

PUBLIC LECTURE (Tuesday, June 24, 4-6pm) - 'What is Introspective Attention?’

WORKSHOP 3 (Wednesday, June 25, 10am-1pm) - 'Visual Consciousness and the Visual Streams’
Discussant: Alex Morgan



VENUE:
All the sessions will be held at the Forum Scientiarum:

FORUM SCIENTIARUM
Doblerstraße 33
72074 Tübingen



Detailed Program with Abstracts

WORKSHOP 1 - What is Attention?

James thought it obvious what attention is, but recent work has raised questions whether any uniform and substantive account of attention can be given. In these chapters, I examine the skepticism, discuss salient aspects of the empirical work on attention in psychology and philosophy, then argue for a specific account of what attention is: selection for action.

Discussant: Chiara Brozzo (CIN Tuebingen)

Reading: Intro, Chps 1-3 of Wu’s Attention (Routledge 2014)


WORKSHOP 2 - Agency and Expertise

What is agency? Two problems have been much discussed in the philosophy of action: the problem of deviant causal chains and the problem of expertise. On the former, how can we give a causal analysis of action that eliminates counterexamples of deviant causal chains; on the latter, how do we understand the differences in expert versus novice behavior. The central idea is control. In these papers, I discuss a structure of agency, the Many-Many Problem, and the influence of intention on different aspects of agency, an influence that illuminates automaticity and cognitive penetration.

Discussant: Gregor Hochstetter (CIN Tuebingen)

Reading: Wu’s 'Mental Action and the Threat of Automaticity'.


PUBLIC LECTURE - What is Introspective Attention?

A fundamental assumption in anglo-american philosophy of mind is that we can directly introspect the phenomenal features of conscious experience. This idea, most evocatively captured in Bertrand Russell’s notion of acquaintance, is an unquestioned assumption that has a long history and remains with us to this day. In this talk, I question this assumption and argue that we have no reason to accept it. I shall argue that attention is necessary for introspection of consciousness, but that the conception of attention that is needed is perceptual attention. The fundamental assumption operative in philosophy, however, posits a different mental capacity of attention, yet I argue that it is an unnecessary posit, one for which we do not have a compelling argument. Rather, perceptual attention can be redeployed to account for certain core features of introspection including infallibility in special cases. It is also consistent with and grounds an appropriate reading of the transparency of conscious experience. To make the case, I shall discuss the connection between attention and action, and unpack the idea of introspection as a special case of mental action.


WORKSHOP 3 - Visual Consciousness and the Visual Streams

The dorsal visual stream is thought to be for action and unconscious. It is a zombie stream. In these papers, I argue for why it is plausible that the dorsal stream is a zombie stream for certain actions and also why it plausibly contributes to conscious vision in a pervasive way.

Discussant: Alex Morgan (CIN Tuebingen)

Reading: Wu’s 'The Case for Zombie Agency', and 'Against Division, Consciousness, Information and the Visual Streams'.