Abstract
One often differs with others in terms of what one is paying attention to. Some of these attentional differences constitute attentional conflicts. Others do not. When we are two co-passengers in a train who do not know each other and I focus on the scenery outside the window while you are paying attention to the email application on your phone, our different ways of attending are not at odds with each other. On the other hand, when we are discussing possible solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict with each other, if I focus too much on historical plight of the Jews while you pay more attention to the contemporary plight of Palestinians displaced by the ongoing conflict, there seems to be a conflict of attention especially when neither of us disagree with each other in terms of the facts about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine or in terms of our commitments to the moral wrongness of genocide in general.
In this paper, I define what an attentional conflict is. An attentional conflict is not a conflict in beliefs, values or a conflict about the semantics of a certain term. Nor is it identical to a conflict in perspectives. Perspectival conflicts are dispositional conflicts in terms of how we see the world (See Young 2000, Camp 2019, Yumusak forthcoming). Attentional conflicts are conflicts arising by virtue of us paying attention to different things in a particular instance. Although attentional conflicts can be caused by perspectival conflicts, the latter are not identical with the former.
In this paper, I conceptualize an attentional conflict as a failure in joint action. Building on the work of Bratman (1992), Fiebich and Gallagher (2012) identify three general conditions for two or more people to be engaged in a joint action: (i) They have a common goal with an intention to cooperate in the common goal, (ii) They have the common knowledge that they are pursuing the common goal, and (iii) They participate in cooperative behavior (often determined by rules and regulations) in order to achieve the common goal. The cooperative behaviors may often involve meshing their subgoals.
I argue that attentional conflicts between us can arise when:
- We are engaged in a joint action with a common goal and the common knowledge that we have a common goal and a common intention to pursue this goal via engaging in cooperative behaviors which may involve meshing our subplans.
- We are unable to mesh our intentions about what you and I pay attention to, resulting in a divergence of sub-plans or a divergence in the organization of sub-plans.
How to attend
This is a read-ahead and/or presentation seminar. The meetings have a hybrid format. We meet in person in GM 467 and digitally on Zoom (Zoom login required).
The meeting link, along with a copy of the paper to be discussed, will be made available in advance via the mailing list.