Abstract
The unpleasantness of pain motivates action. Hence many philosophers have doubted that it can be accounted for purely in terms of pain’s possession of indicative representational content. Instead, they have explained it in terms of subjects’ inclinations to stop their pains, or in terms of pain’s imperative content. I claim that such “noncognitivist” accounts fail to accommodate unpleasant pain’s reason-giving force. What is needed, I argue, is a view on which pains are unpleasant, motivate, and provide reasons in virtue of possessing content that is indeed indicative, but also, crucially, evaluative.
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Notes
For simplicity, I assume asymbolics are in pain, but none of my key claims depends on this.
Versions of these claims also hold for other unpleasant experiences.
I use “rationalise” to refer to a kind of motivating relation, notice, not a kind of explanation.
“Further” and “furthermore” are important. Here I am not (yet) denying that unpleasant pains are or involve desires. See Sect. 3.
See Sect. 3 and note 19.
I use “disturbance of a certain sort” as a place-holder for whatever bodily state the view in question takes pains to represent, for example bodily damage (Tye 1995a, b); “disorder”, defined partly in terms of the threat of bodily damage (Pitcher 1970b); certain kinds of “tissue distortion” (Tye 1995b; Cutter and Tye 2011); or such microphysiological conditions as nociceptor activity (Armstrong 1968).
See B1 above for how I am using “motivational state”. “State”, as I use it, includes events.
See Bricke (1996).
Alternatively, one could restrict “pain” to the whole composite, in which case, notice, asymbolics are not in pain. For discussion, see Bain (2011).
And it allows that this is so independently of further desires, for the e-desires in virtue of which unpleasant pain is motivational and bad are supposed to be components of unpleasant pain. Contrast the view that e-desires make unpleasant pains bad but not unpleasant.
See Rachels (2000).
I’ve reformulated Quinn’s point in my terms.
Klein’s imperativism (2007) is an exception.
For other objections, see Bain (2011).
On some views of desire, imperativism is a desire view, though not one invoking e-desires.
In cases of allodynia, pain is caused by (though not only by) just such innocuous stimuli.
In a paper (1989) written before he embraced imperativism.
Wall (1979) and Melzack et al. (1982) are sceptical of Beecher’s explanation of the Anzio case given that people often fail to feel pain until a considerable time after an injury, even in more mundane circumstances, and even when they conceive of the injury negatively. There is more to be said, but here my point is simply this: if Beecher’s explanation is right, my account of pain’s unpleasantness handles it better than Hall’s dislike approach.
Given an evaluative view of desire, evaluativism can also be elaborated as a desire view, on which pain’s unpleasantness consists in dislike not of pain, but of certain bodily states.
Notice that rejecting this answer would allow us, attractively, to take such aptness to harm to be the “disturbance” that pain’s neutral component represents. (Recall I’ve been using “disturbance” as a mere place-holder for whatever that component represents.)
Cutter and Tye give a “tracking” psychosemantics (2011, p. 91), whereas Helm requires a “background concern” for (in one kind of case) “one’s safety and integrity” (2002, p. 23). In Bain (forthcoming), I suggest that pain asymbolics might be incapable of experiencing bodily states as bad for themselves on account of lacking the appropriate kind of concern or care. See also Klein (in preparation).
See note 28 above.
Evaluativism also promises a straightforward account of the intensity of pain’s unpleasantness, which imperativism fails to do (see Bain 2011).
See also Sect. 8.3 below.
Talk of mental states giving or providing us with reasons is ambiguous between their presenting us with reasons and their constituting reasons, as we shall see.
Similarly, by presenting you with a reason to make amends, feelings of guilt can be motivating reasons, ones that you silence rather than act on if you succeed in forgetting what was making you feel guilty.
This is compatible with grief being bad because unpleasant, provided its unpleasantness consists in possession of evaluative content.
In a fascinating, if telegraphic, discussion, Korsgaard similarly compares grief and physical pain (1996, pp. 145–155, esp. 154–155). But her view of pain is hard to nail down. She claims pain is a perception of bodily conditions and of reasons to change those conditions, which is redolent of evaluativism (1996, p. 148, n. 19, and pp. 149–151). But other remarks of hers are more suggestive of the desire view (1996, pp. 147–148, 154).
Alternatively, one might preserve the analogy by taking “seems” to be doxastic in both the pain and emotion case, if one thinks that perceptual seeming (even in the witting illusion and hallucination cases) involves belief constitutively (see Byrne 2009).
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Acknowledgments
For comments and discussion, I am extremely grateful to Murat Aydede, Michael Brady, Bill Brewer (who gave a very helpful reply to a presentation of an earlier version of the paper), Jennifer Corns, Frederique de Vignemont, Ruth Dick, Rose Drew, Kent Hurtig, Colin Klein, Manolo Martínez, Dermot O’Keeffe, Brendan O’Sullivan, Sebastian Sanhueza, Robert Schroer, Carolin Schulze, Barry Smith, Folke Tersman, and audiences at the Institute Jean Nicod, Paris, and at the Universities of Fribourg, Glasgow, and Uppsala. This paper was written while PI of Glasgow University’s Pain Project, which is funded by Sam Newlands and Mike Rea’s Problem of Evil in Modern and Contemporary Thought project, which is based at the University of Notre Dame and supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
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Bain, D. What makes pains unpleasant?. Philos Stud 166 (Suppl 1), 69–89 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0049-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0049-7