Abstract

There is a debate about whether attention is necessary for your conscious perceptual experiences to justify your beliefs about the external world. This debate has tended to be silent about what unconscious perception might do for our beliefs about the external world. There is also a debate about whether consciousness is necessary for your perception to justify beliefs about the external world. This debate has tended to be silent about what role attention might play in relation to unconscious perception. Here I bring these debates together, and examine whether attention is necessary for your unconscious perception to justify beliefs about the external world. After clarifying the key terms and positions in the debate, I review and refine the case for unconscious perceptual justification. I then argue that unconscious perception can both occur without attention and justify our beliefs in such cases.