Perceptual attention and indeterminacy: Merleau-Pontyian challenges to naïve realism and representationalism

Abstract In Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty criticizes what he calls “Empiricist” and “Intellectualist” accounts of perception. One of his central criticisms is that both misconstrue the relationship between perception and attention. As a result, neither can tell a coherent story about the role of attention in perceptual knowledge. In this paper, we extract the core lessons of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion and apply them to some prominent contemporary accounts of the relation between attention and perception, namely Sebastian Watzl’s (2017) and Bill Brewer’s (2013). Although operating within very different frameworks—Watzl is a representationalist, whereas Brewer is a naïve realist—we show that they encounter a similar set of problems, which are highlighted in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion. We end by providing a set of constraints that any adequate account of the relation between attention and perception must meet, and sketch how the naïve realist and representationalist, each in their own way, might satisfy these constraints.