Representationism 1, as I use the term, says that the phenomenal character of an experience just is its representational content, where that representational content can itself be understood and characterized without appeal to phenomenal character. Representationists seem to have a harder time handling pain than visual experience. I will argue that Michael Tye's heroic attempt at a representationist theory of pain, although ingenious and enlightening, does not adequately come to terms with the root of this difference.

Bodily sensations, such as pain, hunger, itches, or sexual feelings, are commonly characterized in terms of their phenomenal character. In order to account for this phenomenal character, many philosophers adopt strong representationalism. According to this view, bodily sensations are essentially and entirely determined by an intentional content related to particular conditions of the body. For example, pain would be nothing more than the representation of actual or potential tissue damage. In order to motivate and justify their view, strong (...) representationalists often appeal to the reliable causal covariance between bodily sensations and certain kinds of bodily conditions or to the corresponding biological function that these bodily sensations are supposed to fulfill. In this paper, I argue on the basis of recent empirical research that arguments from reliable causal covariance and biological function cannot motivate the introduction of corresponding intentional content. In particular, I argue that bodily sensations are caused by a heterogeneous class of physiological and psychological factors and their biological functions are too diverse to be reduced to the representation of a particular bodily condition. Responses are available to strong representationalists, but they either require substantial alterations to their core assumptions or incur a significant empirical burden. (shrink)

This paper argues that, assuming some widely held views about how vision justifies beliefs, there is an important epistemic asymmetry between visual perception and the perception of bodily sensations. This asymmetry arises when we consider the epistemic significance of the distinction between low-level and high-level properties in perceptual experience. I argue that a distinction exists between low-level and high-level properties of bodily sensations which parallels that distinction in the objects of visual experience. I then survey evidence revealing systematic (...) unreliability in an important dimension of our perception of low-level bodily sensational properties. I argue that this unreliability results in an epistemic asymmetry with vision. I conclude by sketching some implications of this asymmetry for developing a general, unified theory of perceptual justification. (shrink)

This paper challenges the philosophical assumption that bodily sensations are free from normative constraints. It examines the normative status of bodily sensations through two studies: a corpus-linguistic analysis and an experimental investigation. The corpus analysis shows that while emotions are frequently subject to normative judgments concerning their appropriateness, similar attitudes are less evident towards bodily sensations like feelings of pain, hunger and cold. In contrast, however, the experimental study reveals notable differences in conceptions of bodily sensations. (...) It finds that sensations of hunger and cold are occasionally subject to normative assessment, with about half of the participants considering it reasonable to assess these sensations normatively. (shrink)

Prominent figures in the philosophical literature on attention hold that the connection between attention and selection is essential (Mole, 2011), necessary (Wu, 2011; 2014), or conceptual (Smithies, 2011). I argue that selection is neither essentially, necessarily, nor conceptually tied to attention. I first isolate the target conception of selection that I deny is so tightly coupled with attention: graded intramodal selection within consciousness. I analyse two visual cases: analysis of the first case shows that there can be attention without a (...) connection to tasks or action; analysis of the second case shows that there can be attention without a phenomenal foreground/background structure. Finally, I extend the argument into the domain of the body by considering a form of meditative absorption in body sensations to recapitulate the conclusions drawn from the two visual cases. (shrink)

In the opening section of this paper we spell out an account of our na ve view of bodily sensations that is of historical and philosophical significance. This account of our shared view of bodily sensations captures common ground between Descartes, who endorses an error theory regarding our everyday thinking about bodily sensations, and Berkeley, who is more sympathetic with common sense. In the second part of the paper we develop an alternative to this account and discuss (...) what is at stake in deciding between these two ways of understanding our everyday view. In the third and final part of the paper we offer an argument in favour of our alternative. (shrink)

The much neglected "fifth sense" provides the subject matter for this analytical study. The author distinguishes two kinds of perception associated with this sense, perception by touch and perception of bodily state, and gives an account of the nature of the sensations proper to each. The latter are divided into intransitive bodily sensations and transitive bodily sensations. The greater part of the book is devoted to developing the thesis that bodily sensations can be interpreted as sense (...) impressions of occurrences in our own body.--R. H. K. (shrink)

The relevance of inner speech for human psychology, especially for higher-order cognitive functions, is widely recognized. However, the study of the phenomenology of inner speech, that is, what it is like for a subject to experience internally speaking his/her voice, has received much less attention. This study explores the subjective experience of inner speech through empathy for pain paradigm. To this end, an experimental phenomenological method was implemented. Sixteen healthy subjects were exposed to videos of sportswomen/sportsmen having physical accidents practicing (...) extreme sports. Immediately after the exposure to the stimuli, a phenomenological interview was conducted to gather data about bodily sensations, emotions, motivations, and inner speech of watching other people’s accidents. Participant’s inner speech expresses concern about the consequences the accident could generate to the sportswomen/sportsmen or about the participants themselves. Simultaneously, participants’ inner speech happened with negative emotional feelings, many sensations distributed throughout their bodies, and a felt knowledge coming from a meaningful but pre-reflective and pre-verbal bodily dimension. Our findings show that inner speech in empathy is not merely a psycholinguistic process or high-order cognitive function, but rather it is a complex experience that occurs deeply related to meaningful emotions, bodily sensations, and an implicit, somatically felt knowledge. (shrink)

There are good reasons for wanting to adopt an intentionalist account of experiences generally, an account according to which having an experience is a matter of representing the world as being some way or other—according to which, that is, such mental episodes have intrinsic, conceptual, representational content. Such an approach promises, for example, to provide a satisfying conception of experiences’ subjectivity, their phenomenal character, and their crucial role in constituting reasons for our judgements about the world. It promises this, moreover, (...) without incurring the difficulties that face the adverbialist and the friends of such items as qualia and “private objects”. Still, even many of those who have been persuaded of that much are inclined to make an exception of the bodily sensations, since pains and the rest have traditionally been taken to be peculiarly “blank”—instances of brute, non-conceptual feeling. In this study, I reject that tradition and argue that sensation experiences are indeed representational, and hence not in that respect exceptional. The idea that they are nevertheless distinctive in other ways vis-à-vis ordinary perceptual experiences has led intentionalists such as John McDowell to adopt an account of their content that is both mentalist and radically subjectivist: an account, in other words, that takes the items represented by such experiences to be mental and constitutively dependent on their being represented. To my mind, such subjectivism is both viciously circular—like the parallel view of colours—and at odds with the admirably intentionalist aspirations of these views. Hence I turn to consider objectivist versions of intentionalism, views that assimilate sensations to somatosensory perceptual experiences such as those that inform us of, for example, the position of our own limbs. Admittedly, these views not only risk losing the “interiority” of sensations, but I argue that they also cannot be combined with mentalism and that this generates considerable difficulties—difficulties that have either been ignored or underestimated by those working with less demanding conceptions of content. Nonetheless, I make a number of preliminary moves to show how such difficulties might be dealt with, and how the objectivist can register even the distinctively “inner” character of sensations—by, amongst other things, focussing on the peculiarities of somatosensory content. So the prospects for intentionalism about sensations are, I argue, good. (shrink)

Subtle bodily sensations such as itching or fluttering that occur in the absence of any external trigger may serve to locate the spatial boundaries of the body. They may constitute the normal counterpart of extreme conditions in which body-related hallucinations and perceptual aberrations are experienced. Previous investigations have suggested that situations in which the body is spontaneously experienced as being deformed are related to the ability to perform own-body transformations, i.e., mental rotations of the body requiring disembodiment. We therefore (...) decided to consider whether the perception of SPS might relate to embodiment as assessed through the ability to perform own-body transformations and schizotypal traits, since high degrees of schizotypy in the general population have been associated with more vivid perceptions and aberrant perceptual experiences. Then participants completed a standard SPS task. Our analysis revealed that the slower the response time in the OBT task, the more frequent the perception of SPS. This suggests that difficulties in disembodying and mentally transforming one’s own body facilitate feeling oneself. Furthermore, a greater number of correct responses in the OBT task was associated with less frequent perception of SPS. This suggests that finding it easier to disembody and perform mental own-body transformations interferes with the ability to sense oneself. The results also show that higher schizotypal traits, as assessed through the SPQ, are associated with more frequent perception of SPS. Taken together, these results provide a coherent picture and suggest that embodiment is required in order to correctly feel oneself, as expressed through the perception of SPS. The ability to easily experience disembodiment reduces the sense of feeling oneself, and proneness to schizotypal traits produces body misperceptions that enhance and amplify this feeling. The results are discussed in the light of current knowledge and theories about body representations, taking into account attention and interoception as factors that influence body awareness. We offer explanations for perceptual aberrations, body-related delusions, and hallucinations based on misperceived or misinterpreted SPS, and we discuss possible mechanisms that may contribute to feeling and misperceiving oneself. (shrink)

Just like the self, sensations and emotions expressed in literature are elusive issues. Necessarily separated from living reality and yet, in a sense, a mirror of it, linguistic coding of bodily feeling and emotional feeling became subject of avid interest among scholars of historical emotion research and the history of mentality in intra- and intercultural perspectives. This volume combines eleven essays with critical discussions concerning the bidirectional network of sense perception and emotion. Exploring the theme from different angles - (...) psychological, medical, and literary - From Skin to Heart highlights the intimate interrelationship between bodily sensations, states of mind, and the emotions from pain, illness, and self-destruction to love-sickness and self-sacrifice in early Chinese poetry and ethics and late imperial lyrics and narrative. The partly descriptive, partly analytical essays are contributions of a new wave of Continental and American sinology that, inspired by cultural studies, discourse analysis, and rhetorical analysis, offers fresh views on body and psyche as locked into and emerging from Chinese primary sources. An appendix provides additional examples of the rich linguistic material referring to phenomena of sense perception and the affective sphere and their interdependence. (shrink)

Hylomorphists claim that sensation is a bodily act. In this essay, I attempt to make sense of this notion but conclude that sensation is not a bodily act, but a mental one occurring in an intentional field of awareness.

Philosophical considerations regarding experiential spatial content have focused on exteroceptive sensations presenting external entities, and not on interoceptive experiences that present states of our own body. A notable example is studies on interoceptive touch, in which it is argued that interoceptive tactile experiences have rich spatial content such that tactile sensations are experienced as located in a spatial field. This paper investigates whether a similarly rich spatial content can be attributed to experiences of acute, cutaneous pain. It is argued that (...) such experiences of pain do not have field-like content, as they do not present distance relations between painful sensations. (shrink)

This paper examines the different ways in which the body is linguistically codified in the Chinese language of emotions. The three general modes of emotion description under examination are via (a) externally observable (involuntary) bodily changes, (b) sensation, and (c) figurative bodily images. While an attempt is made to introduce a typology of sub-categories within each mode of emotion description, the paper focuses on the meaning of different iconic descriptions through the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). On one (...) hand, the linguistic evidence, from a Chinese perspective, attests to the emotional universals proposed by Wierzbicka (1999). On the other, it points to cultural diversity in bodily conceptualisation and interpretation in emotional experiences, which are crystallised in linguistic conventions of Chinese emotion talk, including certain syntactic constructions. This paper also demonstrates the importance of examining the language of emotions in emotion studies, and concludes that a full account of emotions must include the examination of the language of emotions. (shrink)

Although Descartes and Malebranche argue that we are immaterial thinking things, they also maintain that each of us stands in a unique experiential relation to a single human body, such that we feel as though this body belongs to us and is part of ourselves. This paper examines Descartes’s and Malebranche’s accounts of this feeling. They hold that our experience of being embodied is grounded in affective bodily sensations that feel good or bad: namely, sensations of pleasure and pain, (...) hunger and thirst, and so on. These bodily sensations ground our experiential identification with the body because they represent the body’s needs and interests as though they were own, such that we experience an important aspect of our well-being as consisting in the preservation of the body. According to these Cartesians, then, we feel embodied in part because we experience ourselves as having a bodily good. (shrink)

Common wisdom tells us that we have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. These senses provide us with a means of gaining information concerning objects in the world around us, including our own bodies. But in addition to these five senses, each of us is aware of our own body in way in which we are aware of no other thing. These ways include our awareness of the position, orientation, movement, and size of our limbs (proprioception and kinaesthesia), (...) our sense of balance, and our awareness of bodily sensations such as pains, tickles, and sensations of pressure or temperature. We can group these together under the title. (shrink)

The paper aims to define the concept of “felt sense”, introduced in psychology and psychotherapy by E. T. Gendlin, in order to clarify its relation to bodily sensations and its difference from emotions. Gendlin’s own definition, according to which the felt sense is a conceptually vague bodily feeling with implicit meaning, is too general for this task. Gendlin’s definition is specified by pointing out, first, the different layers of awareness of bodily feelings and, second, the difference between (...) bodily readiness for action and motivation for action. According to the more precise definition, the felt sense is the awareness of readiness to act carried by the configuration of bodily sensations. The felt sense differs from emotions because it is not able to motivate the action for which it makes us ready. The article also discusses the intuition that led to the founding of Gendlin’s psychotherapeutic technique and compares it with the psychoanalytic concept of working through resistance during therapy. (shrink)

Osobliwość takich doznań, jak ból, głód i pragnienie. Reliabilizm w drugiej części szóstej Medytacji Kartezjusza Artykuł omawia epistemiczny status cielesnych doznań takich, jak ból, głód i pragnienia, o których mowa w drugiej części szóstej Medytacji Kartezjusza. Argumentuję, że ów fragment stanowi integralny komponent epistemologicznego programu, który można znaleźć w Medytacjach. Na ogół widzi się Kartezjusza jako zwolennika infallibilizmu, internalizmu oraz fundacjonalizmu. Tymczasem w odniesieniu do wiedzy i przekonań opartych na doznaniach cielesnych przyjmuje on fallibilizm, eksternalizm i reliabilizm. Na rzecz tego (...) wniosku przemawia z jednej strony, analiza tego, czego naucza nas – według Kartezjusza – natura przez wrażenia bólu, głodu i pragnienia, z drugiej strony jego analiza błędów, którym podlega nasza natura, przeprowadzona przeze mnie z wykorzystaniem zaproponowanego przez Wilfrida Sellarsa podziału na logiczną przestrzeń rozumu oraz empiryczną przestrzeń przyczyn. (shrink)

We enjoy immediate knowledge of our own limbs and bodies. I argue that this knowledge, which is also called proprioception, is a special form of perception, special in that it is, unlike perception by the external senses, at the same time also a form of genuine self-knowledge. The argument has two parts. Negatively, I argue against the view, held by G. E. M. Anscombe and strengthened by John McDowell, that this knowledge, bodily self-knowledge, is non-perceptual. This involves, inter alia, (...) rescuing from McDowell’s attack the very idea of receptive self-knowledge. On the positive side, I develop, by drawing on the work of Brian O’Shaughnessy, a detailed account of bodily self-knowledge as a special form of perception. This account spells out how this special form of perception is epistemologically mediated by sensations of a special class of primary qualities—vital-dynamic sensations as I call them—in one’s limbs. (shrink)

Our own body seems to be the object that we know the best for we constantly receive a flow of internal information about it. Yet bodily awareness has attracted little attention in the literature, possibly because it seems reducible to William James’s description of a “feeling of the same old body always there” (1890, p. 242). But it is not true that our body always feels so familiar. In particular, puzzling neurological disorders and new bodily illusions raise a (...) wide range of questions about the relationship between the body and the self. Although most of the time we experience our body as our own, it is possible to report feeling parts of our body as alien. It is also possible to experience extraneous objects, such as prosthetic hands, as our own. Hence, what makes us feel this particular body as our own? The fact that we feel sensations there? The fact that we can voluntarily move it? Or the fact that it needs protection for self-preservation? To answer these questions, we need a better understanding of the various aspects of bodily self-awareness, including the spatiality of bodily sensations, their multimodality, their role in social cognition, their relation to action, and to self-defence. Mind the Body thus provides a comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness and of the sense of bodily ownership, combining philosophical analysis with recent experimental results from cognitive science. (shrink)

I am aware that this hand is my own. But is the sense of ownership of my hand manifested to me in a more primitive form than judgements? On the deflationary view recently defended by Martin and Bermúdez in their works, the sense of bodily ownership has no counterpart at the experiential level. Here I present a series of cases that the deflationary account cannot easily accommodate, including belief-independent illusions of ownership and experiences of disownership despite the presence of (...) bodily sensations. I conclude that there is some kind of non-conceptual intuitive awareness of ownership. (shrink)

Philosophers of perception have been readier to postulate the existence of a visual field than to acknowledge sensory fields in other modalities. In this paper, I argue that the set of phenomenal features that philosophers have relied on when positing a visual field aptly characterise, mutatis mutandis, bodily sensation. I argue, in particular, that in localised bodily sensations we experience the body as a sensory field. I first motivate this claim for the case of haptic touch, and (...) then generalise it to other kinds of bodily sensation. I demonstrate the theoretical fruitfulness of this notion of a bodily field for the debate on the phenomenology of bodily ownership. (shrink)

Sensation of Movement explores the role of sensation in motor control, bodily self-recognition and sense of agency. The sensation of movement is dependent on a range of information received by the brain, from signalling in the peripheral sensory organs to the establishment of higher order goals. Through the integration of neuroscientific knowledge with psychological and philosophical perspectives, this book questions whether one type of information is more relevant for the ability to sense and control movement. Addressing (...) conscious sensations of movement, experimental designs and measures, and the possible functions of proprioceptive and kinaesthetic information in motor control and bodily cognition, the book advocates the integration of neuroscientific knowledge and philosophical perspectives. With an awareness of the diverse ideas and theories from these distinct fields, the book brings together leading researchers to bridge these divides and lay the groundwork for future research. -/- Contributors: Thor Grünbaum and Mark Schram Christensen Andreas Kalckert Myrto Mylopoulos Mads Jensen, Mia Dong, Mikkel C. Vinding, and Morten Overgaard Anne Kavounoudias Matthew R. Longo Hong Yu Wong. (shrink)