著者

西村 正秀

出版者

滋賀大学経済学会

雑誌

彦根論叢 (ISSN:03875989)

巻号頁・発行日

no.393, pp.38-49, 2012

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In "Visual Attention and the Epistemic Role of Consciousness" (2011), John Campbell defends the claim that consciousness is necessary for visual attention. It has been thought that this claim was incoherent with the cases of blindsight where a subject seemed to attend to an object without having a conscious experience of it. In order to dismiss this objection, Campbell appeals to the Boolean map theory of visual attention, a psychological theory developed by Liqiang Huang and Harold Pashler. On this theory, attention consists of two stages, selection and access. The opponents of Campbell suppose that attention is identical to access. This is the reason why blindsight has been regarded as a counterexample of Campbell's claim, because at least a blindsighted subject has an access to an object. Campbell denies this supposition. He argues that consciousness is not connected to access but to selection. If his arguments are sound, we can interpret that a blindsighted subject does not attend to an object because he does not select it consciously. My aim in this paper is to show that Campbell's arguments for the connection between consciousness and selection are not fully convincing.This conclusion supports a slogan endorsed bysome cognitive scientists and philosophers suchthat consciousness is not required for perceptual reference.