Pathologies of Collective Attention

Abstract This article aims to offer a systematic account of pathologies of collective attention. It reconstructs attention, salience, and affordance as interlocking notions through which both subjects and collectives become oriented toward the world in specific ways, before turning to ideology, propaganda, and conspiracism as cases of pernicious attentional dysfunction. Drawing on both analytic epistemology and the tradition of critical theory, I argue that these phenomena are distortions in the way groups pay attention and saliences are misvalued. Taking up the notion of social pathology from the tradition of critical theory, the paper reinterprets it as a metaphor for those modes of collective life that obstruct attuned responsiveness to reality and brings it into dialogue with more recent debates on “negative” epistemic properties in (analytic) epistemology.