Oslo Mind, Language and Epistemology Network Seminar: Harish Pedaprolu, Attentional Conflicts

We often conflict with one another in terms of our perspectives.  This paper shall discuss and critique the accounts of perspectival clashes (which are conceptually much broader than merely attentional conflicts) developed by Elizabeth Camp, Iris Young, and Ege Yumusak. Camp’s Dispositional View, as Yumusak argues, fails to account for cases where two parties might have the same dispositions and yet clash in their perspectives. But Yumusak’s Agenda Theory of Perspectives faces a similar problem: two parties may ask the same questions (and thus have the same agenda) and yet clash in their perspectives. Young’s ‘Agenda’ view is similar to Yumusak’s view but is different in that while it acknowledges that perspectives may be ‘incommensurate’, it sees no sense in speaking of perspectives as ‘clashing’. All three accounts view perspectives in terms of dispositions of some sort. This paper shall argue there cannot be a thoroughgoing definition of perspectival dispositions without a definition of a clash in attentional activity. Attentional conflicts might be related, causally or otherwise, to disagreements in belief or values or in other mental attitudes. However, for analytical purposes, there needs to be a separate account of what attentional conflicts are. This paper aims to develop such an account by drawing on the question-under-discussion (QUD) literature. It will be argued that attentional structures map hierarchies of sub-questions with respect to a super-question under discussion. Two attentional structures conflict when they map different two different hierarchies of sub-questions and it is questionable whether the sub-question at the top of each hierarchy is individually entailed by the common super-question under discussion. Hence, in attentional conflicts, the discourse goal turns from settling the original and commonly shared question-under-discussion to settling the question of what sub-questions are legitimately entailed by the super-question.