# structuring the mind chapter 9 **Opening (not a real abstract):** Phenomenal Structure Center and Periphery—Fringe, Field, and Margin 1 Intelligible Perspectives the effects of attention on appearances. The appearance view is false even of perceptual consciousness. This chapter provides an account of what is missing: attention is essential to the structure of the subject’s conscious perspective. Attention structures consciousness into what is more central and what is more peripheral. Unlike spatial structure, the center-periphery structure of consciousness is not a structure of how the world appears to the subject through her conscious perspective. It is the structure of her perspective itself. William James anticipated what the appearance view misses when he criticized empiricism. He says: [E]xperience [according to empiricism] is supposed to be of something simply given. Attention, implying a degree of reactive spontaneity, would seem to break through the circle of pure **Authors:** [[Phenomenal Structure]]