Several authors have recently argued that the content of pains (and bodily sensations more generally) is imperative rather than descriptive. I show that such an account can help resolve competing intuitions about phantom limb pain. As imperatives, phantom pains are neither true nor false. However, phantom limb pains presuppose falsehoods, in the same way that any imperative which demands something impossible presupposes a falsehood. Phantom pains, like many chronic pains, are thus commands that cannot be satisfied. I conclude by showing (...) that some of the negative psychological consequences of chronic pain are a direct consequence of their imperative nature. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In my thesis, I challenge existing philosophical and scientific accounts of pain to explain certain constitutional, functional and empirical problems. Though difficult, some of these problems will be familiar. Unlike perceptual experiences, pains are strikingly affective and when we are in pain we are primarily concerned with the experience itself rather than mind-independent objects. The obvious explanation, that pain is not a perceptual experience, would be appealing if it were not for the fact that pains vary in quality, intensity and (...) location. These seem to be features of paradigmatic perceptual experiences. The magnitude of another problem, the weakness of the correlation between pain and the stimulus, has been under-played. It is widely observed that those with chronic conditions experience pain in the absence of the stimulus and in circumstances like sport and war severe injuries occur in the absence of pain. I argue that the variable relationship between pain and the stimulus is normal; it is not confined to abnormal cases or circumstances. As no existing account proves explanatorily adequate, I develop a novel position called ‘near-motivationalism’ from a revisionary approach to the conceptual models of pain science. This has the power to solve the problems I set. (shrink)