Stephen Downes

I first encountered the term 'salience' reading Robert Stalnaker's book Caounterfactuals. Something is 'salient' if it is 'more vivid, more relevant'. It stands out. To me, it marked the difference between just any similarity between things, and relevant similarities. Stalnaker, and also David K. Lewis, analyzed salience in terms of possible worlds. I analyzed it in terms of neural networks; something was 'salient' if it stimulated a neural network response. A pattern of perception. This article analyzes salience from a phenomenological, analytical and affective perspective. "Salience as an embodied familiarity," writes Maritina Dimopoulou, "what jumps to attention is an entanglement of the observer with their world." Salience comes with expertise. "Pruning irrelevant dimensions is one of the manifestations of expertise: the domain expert has internalised so many distinctions that deviations from the pattern are visible to them."