Table Of ContentSALIENCE
A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY
Edited by
Sophie Archer
Salience
Salience is both central to human life and relatively underexplored as a
philosophical topic. Whether it bothers you that the picture on your wall is
wonky, whose advice you take, whether you notice the homeless person at your
feet as you squeeze your way down Oxford Street: these are all a function of
salience. Salience is clearly of significance for a broad range of philosophical
problems but rarely, if ever, has salience itself been the theme. This volume
makes it so in an attempt to learn more about the place of salience in
philosophy.
All 13 chapters have been specially commissioned for this volume, and are
written by an international team of leading philosophers.
Salience: A Philosophical Inquiry is essential reading for students and researchers
in philosophy of mind and psychology, epistemology, and ethics. It will also be of
interest to those in related subjects such as psychology, politics, and law.
Sophie Archer is Lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University, UK. Her primary
research interests are in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and
epistemology. She is currently working on a book about belief.
Salience
A Philosophical Inquiry
Edited by Sophie Archer
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 selection and editorial matter Sophie Archer; individual chapters,
the contributors
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: Archer, Sophie, editor.
Title: Salience: A Philosophical Inquiry / edited by Sophie Archer.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021040601 (print) | LCCN 2021040602 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780815385196 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032199474 (pbk) |
ISBN 9781351202114 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Knowledge, Theory of. | Perception. | Attention.
Classification: LCC BD161.S255 2022 (print) | LCC BD161 (ebook) |
DDC 121--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040601
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040602
ISBN: 978-0-815-38519-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-19947-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-20211-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781351202114
Typeset in Goudy
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
Contents
Contributors vii
Introduction: Salience and philosophy 1
SOPHIE ARCHER
1 Life through a lens: Aesthetic virtue and salience vs
Kantian disinterest 10
DAN CAVEDON-TAYLOR
2 Attention, salience, and the phenomenology of visual
experience 24
HEMDAT LERMAN
3 Beyond ‘salience’ and ‘affordance’: Understanding
anomalous experiences of significant possibilities 50
MATTHEW RATCLIFFE AND MATTHEW R. BROOME
4 On salience-based theories of demonstratives 70
ELIOT MICHAELSON AND ETHAN NOWAK
5 The ethics of attention: An argument and a framework 89
SEBASTIAN WATZL
6 Salience and what matters 113
SOPHIE ARCHER
7 Salience, choice, and vulnerability 130
SOPHIE GRACE CHAPPELL
vi Contents
8 The moral psychology of salience 140
CHRISTOPHER MOLE
9 The unquiet life: Salience and moral responsibility 159
SABINA LOVIBOND
10 On salience and sneakiness 177
MARY KATE MCGOWAN
11 Harmful salience perspectives 193
ELLA WHITELEY
12 Salient alternatives and epistemic injustice in folk
epistemology 213
MIKKEL GERKEN
13 Salience principles for democracy 235
SUSANNA SIEGEL
Index 267
Contributors
Sophie Archer is Lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University. Her primary
research interests are in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and
epistemology. She is currently working on a book about belief.
Matthew R. Broome is Professor of Psychiatry and Youth Mental Health, and
Director of the Institute for Mental Health at the University of Birmingham
and Distinguished Research Fellow, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical
Ethics, University of Oxford. Matthew’s research interests include youth
mental health, the prodromal phase of psychosis, delusion formation, mood
instability, functional neuroimaging, interdisciplinary methods, and the
philosophy of psychiatry.
Dan Cavedon-Taylor is a lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University. His
research centrally concerns topics in aesthetics and philosophy of mind, but
extends to issues in ethics, social epistemology, and normative topics more
generally.
Sophie Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University. She
is the author of a number of books, including Knowing What To Do (2014).
With the support of a three-year Leverhulme Trust Major Research
Fellowship (2017-2020), she has recently completed a new book,
provisionally entitled Epiphanies: an ethics and metaethics of experience.
Mikkel Gerken is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern
Denmark. He works on epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of
mind and cognitive science but he has broad interests that include
philosophical methodology and science communication. He is the author
of Epistemic Reasoning and the Mental (2013) and On Folk Epistemology (2017).
Currently he is working on a book, The Significance of Scientific Testimony
(under contract with OUP).
Hemdat Lerman is a teaching fellow and a member of the Warwick Mind and
Action Research Centre at the Philosophy Department at the University of
Warwick. She is co-editor of Perception, Causation, and Objectivity (2011),
and the author of papers in the philosophy of perception.
viii Contributors
Sabina Lovibond is an Emeritus Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, where she
taught philosophy from 1982 to 2011. She is the author of Realism and
Imagination in Ethics (1983), Ethical Formation (2002), Iris Murdoch, Gender
and Philosophy (2011), and Essays on Ethics and Feminism (2015).
Mary Kate McGowan is the Margaret Clapp ‘30 Distinguished Alumna
Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. She works in metaphysics,
philosophy of language, feminism, philosophy of law, and their various
intersections. She is the author of Speech and Harm: Controversies Over Free
Speech (2012), co-edited with Ishani Maitra, and Just Words: On Speech and
Hidden Harm (2019).
Eliot Michaelson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at King’s
College London. His work focuses largely on non-ideal approaches to
language use, approaches which give up on assumptions like: that the
speaker is be understood, that the speaker knows her own mind, or that there
is a single best way for a listener to interpret a bit of speech.
Christopher Mole is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Programme in
Cognitive Systems at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is
the author of Attention is Cognitive Unison (2011), and The Unexplained
Intellect (2016), and is co-author, with Daniel Lafleur and Holly Onclin, of
Understanding Mental Disorders (2019).
Ethan Nowak is Associate Lecturer in the Department of Historical,
Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Umeå University. Most of his work
has to do with language in one way or another. Some focuses on detailed
questions about context-sensitivity in semantics and meta-semantics, while
some takes up broader questions about how we use language to construct our
identities and shape our communities. His contribution to the present
volume was partially supported by the Leverhulme Trust, grant number ECF-
2019-608.
Matthew Ratcliffe is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York, UK. Most
of his recent work addresses issues in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and
philosophy of psychiatry. He is author of Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A
Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (2007), Feelings of
Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (2008), Experiences of
Depression: A Study in Phenomenology (2015), and Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric
Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World (2017).
Susanna Siegel is author of The Contents of Visual Experience (2010) and The
Rationality of Perception (2017). She is Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at
Harvard University.
Sebastian Watzl is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo.
He currently heads a Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences. Watzl works in
the philosophy of mind and psychology with a focus on attention, the theory
Contributors ix
of action, and the relationship between normative and descriptive theories of
the mind. He is the author of Structuring Mind (2017), as well as a range of
articles on attention, perception, consciousness, and action. He has recently
been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for the study of attention norms.
Ella Whiteley is a Fellow in Philosophy at the London School of Economics.
Their primary research interests are in ethical and political philosophy, the
social dimensions of epistemology and language, and the philosophy of
biology. Ella is currently writing on the epistemic and linguistic dimensions
of salience. They are also writing on the “invisible labour” performed in
universities, and have a forthcoming co-authored paper Invisible Labour: Time
and Hermeneutical Injustice. This latter research has emerged from their
previous research role in ‘The Invisible Labour Project’ at the University of
Cambridge.
