Online research in philosophy

How can a pain wake you up? You were not dreaming, nor did any bodily stimuli filter into your consciousness. You did not just wake up and realize you were in pain, as you might wake up and realize it is Saturday. You were deeply, dreamlessly asleep, and suddenly you were awake, and in pain. How is this possible? If pain exists only inasmuch as it is experienced, it seems that the pain did not exist when you were asleep, and so could not have woken you up. I shall argue that you were woken by a pain sensation that you did not know you had, so that the distinction between what is and what is known holds even for the contents of consciousness. This illuminates the relationship between consciousness and attention, and casts light on the Classical Empiricist tradition that identifies the foundations of knowledge with direct experience.

Pain is a fundamentally subjective experience. We have uniquely direct access to our own pain but can only make rough inferences about the pain of others. Nevertheless, such inferences are made all the time by doctors, insurers, judges, juries, and administrative agencies. Advances in brain imaging may someday improve our pain assessments by bolstering the claims of those genuinely experiencing pain while impugning the claims of those who are faking or exaggerating symptoms. These possibilities raise concerns about the privacy of our pain. I suggest that while the use of neuroimaging to detect pain implicates significant privacy concerns, our interests in keeping pain private are likely to be weaker than our interests in keeping private certain other subjective experiences that permit more intrusive inferences about our thoughts and character.

It can seem natural to say that, when in pain, we undergo experiences which present to us certain experience-dependent particulars, namely pains. As part of his wider approach to mind and world, John McDowell has elaborated an interesting but neglected version of this account of pain. Here I set out McDowell’s account at length, and place it in context. I argue that his subjectivist conception of the objects of pain experience is incompatible with his requirement that such experience be presentational, rationalizing, and classificatory.

As a product of natural selection, pain behavior must serve an adaptive function for the species beyond the accurate portrayal of the pain experience. Pain behavior does not simply refer to the pain experience, but promotes survival of the species in various and complex ways. This means that there is no purely respondent or operant pain behavior found in nature.

The aim of this paper is to show that the empirical and conceptual constraints arising from the scientific research on pain phenomena should be taken into account in philosophical discussions concerning the nature and function of pain; otherwise, there is a good chance that philosophers will advocate too simplistic, confused or even outrightly mistaken theories or conceptions of pain. In order to prove this point, one of the most influential philosophical theories of pain—the so-called perceptual view of pain—is put to scrutiny in the light of the psychological, clinical and neurophysiological data coming from the field of pain research. More specifically, these data are presented in such a way as to show that the sensory quality or sensory aspect of pain is, contrary to the objectivistic claims of the perceptual view of pain, a necessary component of our total pain experience.

Do animals other than humans feel pain? How do we know? Well, how do we know if anyone, human or nonhuman, feels pain? We know that we ourselves can feel pain. We know this from the direct experience of pain that we have when, for instance, somebody presses a lighted cigarette against the back of our hand. But how do we know that anyone else feels pain? We cannot directly experience anyone else's pain, whether that "anyone" is our best friend or a stray dog. Pain is a state of consciousness, a "mental event", and as such it can never be observed. Behavior like writhing, screaming, or drawing one's hand away from the lighted cigarette is not pain itself; nor are the recordings a neurologist might make of activity within the brain observations of pain itself. Pain is something that we feel, and we can only infer that others are feeling it from various external indications.

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.

That pain and suffering are unwanted is no truism. Like the sadist, the masochist wants pain. Like sadism, masochism entails an irrational, abnormal attitude toward pain. I explain this abnormality.