Reference and Consciousness

The book consists of an Introduction and twelve chapters. The opening chapters develop the concepts of experiential highlighting and knowledge of reference, followed by analyses of spatial perception, action, sortal concepts, and linguistic sense. The middle chapters defend a relational view of experience and examine the explanatory role of consciousness, particularly how conscious attention identifies objects for thought and activates relevant information-processing systems. Later chapters explore joint attention, memory-based demonstratives, anti-realist theories of meaning, Quinean indeterminacy and inscrutability of reference, and the metaphysical distinction between dispositional and categorical properties. Throughout the work, philosophical analysis is integrated with selected findings from cognitive science and research on visual attention.