 Declan Smithies has argued in favour of a position according to which everything that is attended to is consciously attended to. He claims that all instances of attention must be consciousness-involving, on the grounds that (1) all such instances must have a connection with their subject’s ‘rational-access’ to the contents of her experience, and (2) there is no connection to rationality in the case of processing that is wholly unconscious. Smithies’ view is, therefore, that attention is essentially involved in the ‘rational-access’ of consciously experienced contents (Smithies, 2011). The nature of any such connection between attention to an experience and the justificatory force of that experience is itself a source of ongoing controversy: Johannes Roesller has argued that John McDowell’s theory of perceptual experience’s reason-giving force cannot account for the role played by attention in experience (Roessler, 2011); Susanna Siegel and Nicholas Silins have claimed that the doxastic influence of an experience can be an instance of rational access even when that experience receives no attention (Siegel &amp; Silins, 2014); Terry Horgan and Matjaž Potrč have argued that the justification of beliefs by experience must outrun both the contents of attention and the contents of consciousness (Horgan and Potrč 2011). Here, as above, one’s understanding of attention and one’s understanding of epistemology constrain one another, and may provide a theory-driven route by which to settle questions about the possibility of unconscious attentiveness.