Priority and Prejudice

Abstract What is salient to us and what we attend to play a fundamental role in shaping how we perceive, think about, and act in the world. Salience and attention shape our mental lives in ways that have profound epistemic significance, determining how we gather evidence, what sorts of inquiries we undertake, and what we do with the beliefs we form as a result of that. And yet they have not traditionally fallen within the purview of epistemology. We have a lacuna in our epistemic resources: What should be salient to us? What should we attend to? How should we evaluate how we prioritize and select information? We need a framework for evaluating salience and attention from a distinctively epistemic perspective. This book proposes a novel construct, salience structures, which describes how our informational landscape is contoured by a range of causes, reflecting what is salient to us, and what we are likely to attend to. It then offers an evaluative framework for salience structures, describing the epistemic norms which apply to them. It applies that framework to a range of phenomena, including ignorance and inquiry, showing how it helps us better understand the nature of prejudice and the role of search engines in our lives.