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Notes
In what follows I use ‘pain’ synecdochically to refer to sensations generally, i.e. to localized feelings that always have (or at least are experienced as having) a particular location in (or on) one’s body, such as pains, itches, tingles, tickles, twinges, and the like. I have very little to say about perception—seeing, hearing, etc.—and am not sanguine, in fact, about the possibility that what I say about sensation can plausibly be extended to perception.
Classic proponents of adverbialism include Ducasse (1942), Chisholm (1957), and Sellars (1975). For critical discussion, see Jackson (1977). Recent, or relatively recent, adverbialist analyses of pain have been offered by Tye (1984), Douglas (1998), and Bennett and Hacker (2003); recent objectualist analyses has been offered by Nelkin (1986, 1994) and Langsam (1995). A number of philosophers have also recently defended adverbial analyses of conscious experience generally (and thus adverbial analyses of pain), including Thomasson (2000), Thomas (2003), and Zahavi (2004, 2005).
I elaborate on the ‘in some suitable way’ clause of the principle in the “An adverbialist–objectualist account of pain” section, but it bears stating at the outset that the relevant awareness would have to be unmediated, i.e. based on neither conscious inference nor conscious observation. This is because there are cases in which we become aware of a particular mental state even though we would not regard it as conscious in the pertinent sense—for example, when a person infers that he is depressed on the basis of his recent behaviour, or on the basis of a friend’s testimony.
I say more about higher-orderism in the “An adverbialist–objectualist account of pain” section.
TP also leaves it open whether the subject’s awareness of M is an intrinsic or extrinsic property of M. I discuss the question of whether our awareness of our conscious states should be treated along intrinsic or extrinsic lines in the “An adverbialist–objectualist account of pain” section. And, finally, TP leaves it open whether conscious states possess what is referred to as de se content, or content that concerns oneself, not the world. A number of philosophers (Rosenthal 1986; Gennaro 1996) hold that conscious experiences have a de se component; that is, they hold that one’s awareness of a particular experience includes, eo ipso, an awareness of oneself as subject of that experience. On this view, one is not merely aware of seeing the tree; one is also aware, if only implicitly, of oneself seeing the tree.
The pro-TP brief that follows is a briefer version of a pro-TP brief found in Janzen (2011, pp. 285–7).
It is to be noted that there is disagreement about whether there is phenomenological evidence for TP. Gennaro (2012, pp. 111–14), for example, denies that such evidence exists. As I have suggested, however, it is difficult to account for the intuitive attractiveness of TP without appealing to phenomenological considerations. For a fuller argument to this effect, see Janzen (2008, pp. 100–1).
Some have maintained that the notion of an unfelt or unconscious pain is incoherent (Ryle 1949, p. 203; Hacker 1986, p. 70), and perhaps it is. But there is also room for disagreement here. Contrary to what those who reject the notion of unconscious pain sometimes assert, the notion of an unconscious pain is not an affront to common sense. It seems natural to suppose, for example, that if I fall asleep while suffering from a headache, only to wake up twenty minutes later with the same headache, then the pain was there all along, despite being unfelt. This is no less believable, in any case, than the suggestion that I had two different pains with the same intensity: the one I had before losing consciousness, which disappeared the moment I fell asleep, and the one I had after I regained consciousness, whose onset coincided exactly with my waking up. In any event, since the view I defend in this paper does not demand that I take a position either way, I will remain noncommittal about whether there are unconscious pains.
I, too, once held that, prior to reflection, pain is not a mental object (2008, pp. 115–18). At the time, however, I believed, falsely, that to conceive of it as a mental object is to conceive of it as an object like any other, only mental. But a plausible alternative, defended here, is to conceive of it as a distinctive kind of adverbial mental object.
It is, though, a referring expression, since it refers to a thing, where a thing is anything that can be said to be. Pain is, of course, a thing in this sense; it’s a mode of awareness, a way of being aware of something, and ways can be said to be.
To say that this characterization of adverbialism departs from most traditional characterizations is not to say that it is unprecedented. Douglas (1998), for example, defends an adverbialist theory of pain, but he also construes pains as having objects, viz., instances of bodily damage.
Later (in the “An adverbialist–objectualist account of pain” section) I modulate this claim, arguing that the objects of pain are bodily areas experienced as being disturbed.
The traditional distinction between content and object is worth noting (see Smith 1989, pp. 7–10, for a concise review of some considerations that force this distinction). Every conscious experience has content, but some experiences, such as hallucinations, do not have an object. Nevertheless, we should like to say that even hallucinatory experiences are experiences ‘of’ something, that they have content. If I hallucinate a pink elephant, there is no object of my experience, but the content of my experience is something that appears to me as pink and elephant-like. To say, however, that there is a distinction between content and object is not to say that, on any legitimate conception of content, the content of an experience can never be identified with the actual object or property currently being perceived or felt. If I see a sunset (veridically, without illusion or hallucination), the object—and also the content—of my visual experience is, simply, the sunset. Or so it seems natural to suppose.
Cf. Douglas (1998, p. 138).
‘Aware’, in this context, is not altogether apt, since, arguably, to hallucinate an object is not to be aware of it, at least if ‘aware’ is being used in its ordinary sense. ‘Experience’ is more suitable. When one has a hallucination of, say, a pink elephant, one experiences something pink and elephant-like; similarly, when one has phantom limb pain, one experiences a missing appendage.
This approach to phantom limb pain is apparently endorsed by Tye: ‘Pains, viewed as experiences, intuitively can be misleading or inaccurate. Take the case of phantom limb pains. You have no right leg and yet you experience pain in the leg. How is that possible? Answer: in undergoing the pain experience, you hallucinate a right leg’ (2005, p. 100).
It is sometimes claimed that the objects of hallucination are, in some sense, genuine objects: they ‘subsist’ (or are ‘constituted’ in some way, or whatever). And since I have maintained that having pain in a phantom limb pain is analogous to having a hallucination, it might be objected that I am committed to affirming that the objects of phantom limb pain are, in some sense, genuine objects. Thus, the sort of adverbial analysis of pain I endorse does not dispense with mysterious intra-mental entities associated with pain after all. My reply: this kind of Meinongianism is deeply problematic, perhaps even unintelligible. The objects of hallucination do not exist—they are nothing—so just as it’s meaningless to say that gods and ghosts are, in some sense, genuine objects, so it is meaningless to say that hallucinated pink elephants (or tissue trauma in phantom limbs) are, in some sense, genuine objects.
My view, as it happens, is that the awareness at issue here is not an unconscious awareness. Rather, one is experientially aware of the painful way in which one is aware of one’s foot. In fact, this is true, on my view, of conscious states generally: every conscious state is such that its subject is experientially aware of it (see Janzen 2008, pp. 100–1, 160–1). Smith describes this feature of consciousness in terms of the way subjects ‘experience consciousness’ (1988, p. 30; 2004, pp. 82, 94–5); and Zahavi describes it, along similar lines, in terms of one’s having ‘experiential access to one’s own consciousness’ (2004, p. 78). Higher-order theorists, by contrast, deny that we are experientially aware of our conscious states, arguing that this is true only during acts of introspection. Gennaro, for example, has contended that the view that we are experientially aware of our conscious states falls afoul of the fact that it is impossible for our conscious attention to be multi-directed: ‘it is either world directed or inner directed (but never both at the same time)’ (2012, p. 108). A full discussion of this complex issue is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say, an ‘acquaintance’ model of the awareness we have our conscious states—i.e. a model according to which such awareness consists in one’s conscious states being given or manifested (as opposed to, say, represented) to one—has, I believe, the resources to deflect Gennaro’s objection. The basic idea, according to this model, is that a subject lives through her conscious experiences (cf. Zahavi 2005, pp. 121–2), and in virtue of living through her conscious experiences, they are given to her—they are simply there, all along—while her attention is focused on the object of her experience. To the objection that to subscribe to this model is effectively to abandon TP (since, on this model, we are not aware of our conscious states), I would deny that, on this model, we are not aware of our conscious states. We are aware of our conscious states on this model; only, our awareness of them is not like our awareness of extra-mental objects.
I reject, then, the thesis that conscious experiences are transparent or diaphanous, i.e. the thesis, roughly, that it is impossible to attend directly to our experience except by attending to the objects of that experience (Harman 1990, Tye 1995). It may be difficult, sometimes, to attend directly to our experience, but it is not impossible.
I here remain neutral on the question of whether experiencing a part of one’s body in this way requires the mobilization of concepts.
Arguably, the expressions ‘S is aware of M’ and ‘S is aware of being in M’ do not report the same mental state. This complication may be disregarded here.
Early defenders of this view include Aristotle (see Caston 2002) and Brentano (1874, 1982). Contemporary defenders include Smith (2005), Williford (2006), and Janzen (2008). Brentano sums up the view as follows: ‘Every consciousness, upon whatever object it is primarily directed, is concomitantly directed upon itself’ (1982, p. 25). Gennaro (1996, 2012) has defended a version of the HOT theory—what he calls the ‘wide intrinsicality view’ (WIV)—that posits an intrinsic relation between higher-order thoughts and the mental states they are about. On his view, a higher-order thought is part of a complex state that includes the lower-order state as a proper part. The two parts are still distinct, however, and so the WIV is not a reflexive view. There are other views that straddle the line between higher-orderism and reflexivism. According to Carruthers’ (2000) dispositionalist version of the HOT theory, for example, it is one and the same mental state that possesses both first-order non-conceptual content and higher-order non-conceptual content. In addition, Sartre’s (1956) theory of consciousness is neither a HO theory nor a reflexive theory (though it is appreciably more similar to the latter than the former).
The wording here is potentially misleading. I do not mean to imply that a higher-order state’s ‘rendering’ a mental state conscious (or ‘conferring’ consciousness on a mental state) is a matter of the higher-order state’s causing some kind of intrinsic change to the mental state. As Rosenthal (e.g. 2000, §III) has stressed, being aware of a mental state, under the higher-order theory, results in no change to that state’s intrinsic properties. The idea is not that the presence of an appropriate higher-order thought (or perception) causes, or produces, or gives rise to a conscious mental state M, but rather that the compresence of M and the higher-order state constitutes M’s being conscious.
In his initial formulation of the higher-order thought theory, Rosenthal claimed that mental states cause the higher-order thoughts of which they are objects, but he subsequently rescinded the causal requirement, arguing that it ‘is very likely too strong’ (1990, p. 744). According to Rosenthal, our mental states might play a part in causing higher-order thoughts, but they need not be the principal causal factor. See also Gennaro (1996, pp. 73–5).
Cf. Natsoulas (2004, pp. 102–3).
The converse does not hold, arguably; that is, a case could be made that it is possible for one to be in pain even though it does not seem to one as though one is—e.g. in cases of unconscious or unfelt pain.
If this is correct, then psychogenic pain is genuine pain since it is possible for it to seem to one as though one is in pain even though one’s pain is not caused by any corresponding injury. But this consequence should not be troubling. It is possible for subjects to continue to experience (agonizing) pain despite coming to learn, and sincerely believe, that their pain is psychogenic (Bass et al. 2001; Tyrer and Wigham 2005); and the subjects’ pain, in such cases, is no less real, i.e. no less that which disposes the subjects to seek relief (perhaps through psychotherapy), than pain that is caused by injury or disease.
This is, of course, the important problem of ‘misrepresentation’ often invoked against higher-orderism. For the best recent overview and discussion of the problem, see Gennaro (2012, pp. 59–70).
Higher-order theorists maintain that the higher-order hypothesis is an explanatory hypothesis appropriate for application to the sciences: consciousness is empirically explicable in terms of a relation between lower-order mental states and numerically distinct higher-order states.
Nelkin, it should be noted, revised his thesis regarding the affective–cognitive element of pain in his 1994, deemphasizing its centrality to pain.
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Janzen, G. An adverbialist–objectualist account of pain. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 859–876 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9289-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9289-4