Salience

In the philosophy of mind, ‘salience’ is often used to describe the way in which a thing (object, state, property, process) t ‘stands-’ or ‘jumps-out’ to an agent. Some talk about salience in terms of ‘prominence’, or where t is ‘foregrounded’ or ‘spotlighted’ in experience. Marking this description, salience is routinely described in comparative terms; t is considered salient relative to other things, themselves backgrounded. These other things might be treated as entirely un-salient, or less salient; there are disagreements over whether salience is a graded phenomenon. Descriptions of prominence and foregroundedness paint a certain (1) phenomenal picture of salience. These often centre on the experience of consciously attending in some way to a thing t, or the experience of having one’s attention drawn to or pulled by t (whether or not one does in fact attend to t). There are different accounts regarding how best to characterise this phenomenal character, while some suggest that there is in fact no determinate phenomenal upshot of salience. Other subject-level characterisations of salience cash it out (2) functionally, capturing the purported role it plays. Candidate accounts here include, for example, the idea that salience is the propensity to attend, or that t is salient when it is preferentially selected to solve the ‘many-many problem’, i.e. the challenge of choosing a specific action when confronted with many inputs and many potential outputs. ‘Accessibility’ is often invoked in functional definitions; here, a mental state can be called salient when it is more cognitively accessible, which in turn might be defined in terms of the relative cognitive ease and speed with which it is retrieved. As with phenomenal salience, functional salience can be split into accounts that require the actual deployment of attention, versus those requiring dispositions or readiness to attend. Neither the actual deployment of attention, nor a disposition to attend, are required by discussions of (3) ‘objective’ salience (though some capacity to attend is implied). Even if subject S neither in fact attends to their child’s needs, nor has a disposition or readiness to attend to them, we might still say that their child’s needs are salient. Here we imply that their child’s needs are objectively salient, drawing on some ethical (or epistemic, prudential, etc.) norm or goal. Many normative discussions of salience draw on the idea of objective salience.