 The attentional requirements that have to be met before one can acquire knowledge from experience or recognize an a priori entitlement are not requirements merely for alertness. They are not captured merely by saying that, in order to gain knowledge, the thinker has to pay some attention to the relevant ideas. A thinker may be attending to a syllogism, but, if he is attending to its rhythm, he may still be unable to see that the conclusion follows. A non-question begging characterisation of the attentional requirements of knowledge acquisition in general would be an important contribution to epistemology. Current work on attention, focussing as it does on attention as a perceptual phenomenon, may give us only part of the general theory that we need. Work on the purely intellectual forms of attention continues to be scarce. This shortcoming has been emphasized by Mark Fortney, who argues that the neglect of intellectual attention has led philosophers to misinterpret some of the claims made in the empirical literature on attention and consciousness (Fortney, 2019). Fortney also claims that considerations pertaining to intellectual attention should have a central role in debates about the transparency of phenomenology, and about the consequences of this transparency for the epistemology of self-attributed thoughts (debates that are exemplified, in Fortney’s discussion, by Byrne, 2018). Fortney suggests that, when attention is given this role, certain results from cognitive psychology cast light on these debates. He thinks, when seen in this light, some of the claims that have been made about the transparency of occurrent thought start to seem dubious (Fortney, 2020).