Tracking Representationalism and the Painfulness of Pain (Philosophical Issues, 2011) (original) (raw)
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Tracking Representationalism and the Painfulness of Pain
forms of representationalism, see Tye forthcoming. 2 This does not entail that it is the neurophysiological properties of the state that make that state an experience. Compare: a token sunburn is identical with a particular physical state of one's skin, but it is not (merely) the intrinsic physical properties of the state of one's skin that make that state a sunburn. One might hold that having representational content is an essential property of experiences and that states have content not in virtue of their intrinsic physical properties, but in virtue of their relations to external objects and properties, in which case one may accept that token experiences are identical with token neural states while denying that it is the neurophysiological properties of the state which make that state an experience. One further comment: sometimes it is held by naturalists that token experiences are constituted by brain states without being identical with them. This is our own preferred view but for ease of exposition we ignore it in what follows.
Evaluativist Accounts of Pain's Unpleasantness
In Jennifer Corns (ed.) Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Pain, 2017
Evaluativism is best thought of as a way of enriching a perceptual view of pain to account for pain’s unpleasantness or painfulness. Once it was common for philosophers to contrast pains with perceptual experiences (McGinn 1982; Rorty 1980). It was thought that perceptual experiences were intentional (or content-bearing, or about something), whereas pains were representationally blank. But today many of us reject this contrast. For us, your having a pain in your toe is a matter not of your sensing “pain-ly” or encountering a sense-datum, but of your having an interoceptive experience representing (accurately or inaccurately) that your toe is in a particular experience-independent condition, such as undergoing a certain “disturbance” or being damaged or in danger (Armstrong 1962; Tye 1995). But even if such representational content makes an experience a pain, a further ingredient seems required to make the pain unpleasant. According to evaluativism, the further ingredient is the experience’s possession of evaluative content: its representing the bodily condition as bad for the subject. In this chapter, I elaborate evaluativism, locate it among alternatives, and explain its attractions and challenges.
Philosophical Quarterly, 2003
The pain case can appear to undermine the radically intentionalist view that the phenomenal character of any experience is entirely constituted by its representational content. That appearance is illusory, I argue. After categorising versions of pain intentionalism along two dimensions, I argue that an “objectivist” and “non-mentalist” version is the most promising, provided it can withstand two objections: concerning what we say when in pain, and the distinctiveness of the pain case. I rebut these objections, in a way that’s available to both opponents and adherents of the view that experiential content is entirely conceptual. In doing so I illuminate peculiarities of somatosensory perception that should interest even those who take a different view of pain experiences.
Locating and Representing Pain
Philosophical Investigation, 2019
Two views on the nature and location of pain are usually contrasted. According to the first, experientialism, pain is essentially an experience, and its bodily location is illusory. According to the second, perceptualism or representationalism, pain is a perceptual or representational state, and its location is to be traced to the part of the body in which pain is felt. Against this second view, the cases of phantom, referred and chronic pain have been marshalled: all these cases apparently show that one can be in pain while not having anything wrong in her body. Pain bodily location, then, would be illusory. I this paper I shall defend the representational thesis by presenting an argument against experientialism while conceding that the appearance / reality distinction collapses. A crucial role in such identification is played by deictics. In reporting that we feel pain here, the deictic directly refers to the bodily part as coinciding with the part as represented. So, pain location is not illusory. The upshot is that the body location is part and parcel of the representational content of pain states, a representation built up from the body map.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2011
Pain, crucially, is unpleasant and motivational. It can be awful; and it drives us to action, e.g. to take our weight off a sprained ankle. But what is the relationship between pain and those two features? And in virtue of what does pain have them? Addressing these questions, Colin Klein and Richard J. Hall have recently developed the idea that pains are, at least partly, experiential commands—to stop placing your weight on your ankle, for example. In this paper, I reject their accounts. Against Klein, I use dissociation cases to argue that possession of ‘imperative content’ cannot wholly constitute pain. Against them both, I further claim that possession of such content cannot even constitute pain’s unpleasant, motivational aspect. For, even if it were possible to specify the relevant imperative content—which is far from clear—the idea of a command cannot bear the explanatory weight Klein and Hall place on it.
Utilitas, 2009
It is widely held that it is only contingent that the sensation of pain is disliked, and that when pain is not disliked, it is not intrinsically bad. This conjunction of claims has often been taken to support a subjectivist view of pain’s badness on which pain is bad simply because it is the object of a negative attitude and not because of what it feels like. In this paper, I argue that accepting this conjunction of claims does not commit us to this subjectivist view. They are compatible with an objectivist view of pain’s badness, and with thinking that this badness is due to its phenomenal quality. Indeed, I argue that once the full range of options is in view, the most plausible account of pain is incompatible with subjectivism about value.
Series in Continental Thought (Ohio University Press), 2020
The Phenomenology of Pain is the first book-length investigation of its topic to appear in English. Groundbreaking, systematic, and illuminating, it opens a dialogue between phenomenology and such disciplines as cognitive science and cultural anthropology to argue that science alone cannot clarify the nature of pain experience without incorporating a phenomenological approach. Building on this premise, it develops a novel conception of pain grounded in phenomenological principles: pain is an aversive bodily feeling with a distinct experiential quality, which can only be given in original first-hand experience, either as a feeling-sensation or as an emotion. The book crystallizes the fundamental methodological principles that underlie phenomenological research. On the basis of those principles, it offers a phenomenological clarification of the fundamental structures of pain experience and contests the common conflation of phenomenology with introspectionism. It analyzes numerous pain dissociation syndromes, brings into focus the de-personalizing and re-personalizing nature of chronic pain experience, and demonstrates what role somatization and psychologization play in pain experience. In the process, it advances Husserlian phenomenology in a direction that is not explicitly worked out in Husserl’s own writings.
Painfulness, Suffering, and Consciousness (penultimate draft)
The Philosophy of Suffering, eds. D. Bain, M. Brady and J. Corns, 2019
The popular view on which unpleasant pain consists of two dissociable components, and on which there may be pains that wholly lack affect, is the product of a theoretical deference to consciousness. The same is true of the thesis that suffering is exclusively a conscious phenomenon. Pain researchers defer to consciousness, but in my view they do not properly heed its message regarding pain, painfulness, and suffering. I will argue that consciousness actually gives us a double-edged message about these phenomena. Introspection reveals pain and painfulness to be essentially kinds of qualia, or qualitative character, (§1)—a thesis I defend from the ‘heterogeneity problem’ (§2). But introspection also prompts a conception of pain and painfulness on which these are capable in principle of unconscious existence (§3, §5). This implies, in turn, that suffering may well occur unconsciously (§§4-5), something I argue for in part by criticising rival models of suffering (§4). Taking consciousness seriously as an epistemic source for the natures of pain, painfulness, and suffering, thus has the surprising result that consciousness is removed from the metaphysics of pain, painfulness, and suffering.