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Unfelt pain

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Abstract

The standard view in philosophy treats pains as phenomenally conscious mental states. This view has a number of corollaries, including that it is generally taken to rule out the existence of unfelt pains. The primary argument in support of the standard view is that it supposedly corresponds with the commonsense conception of pain. In this paper, we challenge this doctrine about the commonsense conception of pain, and with it the support offered for the standard view, by presenting the results of a series of new empirical studies that indicate that lay people not only tend to believe that unfelt pains are possible, but actually, quite common.

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Notes

  1. This view is not only found amongst philosophers, but extends to scientists studying pain as well. For instance, the International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage” and they go on to note that “activity induced in the nociceptor and nociceptive pathways by a noxious stimulus is not pain, which is always a psychological state, even though we may well appreciate that pain most often has a proximate physical cause” (1986: p. 250).

  2. The putative tension between the two threads is part of the reasoning of why philosophers have considered the ordinary concept of pain to be paradoxical. Note, however, that especially Aydede has cast little doubt that the intuitions of laypeople are very clear in supporting the standard view of pain, in particular by ruling out the possibility of unfelt pains. The so-called paradox of pain that both Aydede and Hill highlight, arises more directly because of the tension between the semantic properties of pain expressions that point to a bodily conception of pain and the standard view that treats pains as mental states. Both philosophers have offered interesting ways of solving this putative paradox. However, we will not engage with their arguments as the point of this paper is a different one: if the standard view of pain is mistaken, no such paradox of pain even begins to arise (see also Reuter 2017).

  3. In fact, Hill (2009) has argued that the best way to solve these conceptual difficulties would be to introduce two new concepts, one referring to bodily disturbances and the other referring to mental states.

  4. In fact, there is evidence that most native English speakers distinguish between colors and the perception of colors. Sytsma (2009) argues that lay people tend to hold a naïve view of colors, treating them not as phenomenal qualities, but as mind-independent qualities of objects located outside of the mind/brain. This line of argument is further developed in Sytsma (2010), which presents empirical evidence for the claim.

  5. See e.g. Tye (2006) for holding such a view.

  6. For a recent discussion of this work, see Sytsma (2016); see also the other chapters in II.C of Sytsma and Buckwalter (2016) and the discussion in Sytsma and Livengood (2015). For a collection of cutting-edge articles, see Sytsma (2014a).

  7. See Sytsma and Reuter (2017) for a recent overview on experimental philosophy of pain.

  8. While this paper focuses on the question of whether lay people accept the possibility of unfelt pains, it is worth briefly noting that the results have implications for wider debates in philosophy of mind. Sytsma and Machery (2010) argue that a principal reason offered in the recent literature for believing in phenomenal consciousness is that its existence is pretheoretically obvious. If this is the case, however, then we should expect lay people to employ something like the philosophical concept in making mental state attributions. But there is a growing body of evidence that lay people do not categorize mental states along phenomenal lines as philosophers do (Sytsma and Machery 2009, 2010, 2012; Sytsma 2010, 2012, 2014b; see Machery and Sytsma 2011 for a brief overview). Insofar as pains are often taken by philosophers to be paradigmatic examples of phenomenally conscious mental states, evidence that lay people do not conceive of pains in this way offers some support for the claim that they do not employ the concept of phenomenal consciousness.

  9. The same restrictions were used for each study reported in this paper. Responses for all studies were collected through the Philosophical Personality website (http://philosophicalpersonality.com), except where otherwise indicated. Participants were counted as having more than minimal training in philosophy if they were philosophy majors, had completed a degree with a major in philosophy, or had taken graduate-level courses in philosophy.

  10. 77.4% women, with an average age of 45.0 years, and ranging in age from 16 to 72.

  11. χ2(1, N = 31) = 18.58, p < 0.001, one-tailed.

  12. 74.6% women, with an average age of 35.3 years, and ranging in age from 16 to 88.

  13. 92.5% answered “yes” to Question 1 and 91.0% answered “yes” to Question 3.

  14. χ2(1, N = 67) = 7.22, p = 0.004, one-tailed. The same holds if we remove the seven participants who answered “no” to either Question 1 or Question 3: 71.7% answered “yes” to Question 2, which is significantly above 50%—χ2(1, N = 60) = 10.42, p < 0.001, one-tailed.

  15. 70.5% women, with an average age of 34.6 years, and ranging in age from 16 to 74.

  16. χ2(1, N = 88) = 5.01, p = 0.013, one-tailed. Again, we found strong agreement with Questions 1 and 3, with 94.3% selecting “yes” for each question. And the results for Question 2 remain significant if we remove the eight participants who answered “no” to either question: 63.8% answered “yes” to Question 2, which is significantly above 50%—χ2(1, N = 80) = 5.51, p = 0.009, one-tailed.

  17. 80.1% women, with an average age of 41.1 years, and ranging in age from 16 to 75.

  18. χ2(1, N = 156) = 25.44, p < 0.001, one-tailed. Again, we found strong agreement with Questions 1 and 3, with 95.5% selecting “yes” for the former and 96.8% for the latter. And the results for Question 2 remain significant if we remove the 11 participants who answered “no” to either question: 71.0% answered “yes” to Question 2, which is significantly above 50%—χ2(1, N = 145) = 24.83, p < 0.001, one-tailed.

  19. 76.3% women, with an average age of 39.5 years, and ranging in age from 16 to 78.

  20. t(37) = 3.43, p < 0.001. Again, we found strong agreement with Questions 1 and 3, with a mean response of 6.55 for the former and 6.68 for the latter. Further, no participant selected an answer on the lower half of the scale (1, 2, or 3) for either question.

  21. The full vignette is available in the online appendix.

  22. 61.7% women, with an average age of 39.3 years, and ranging in age from 16 to 78.

  23. χ2(1, N = 47) = 19.15, p < 0.001, one-tailed.

  24. 59.5% women, with an average age of 40.5 years, and ranging in age from 16 to 79.

  25. t(41) = −2.47, p = 0.009, one-tailed.

  26. 87.7% women, with an average age of 41.4 years, and ranging in age from 16 to 69.

  27. χ2(1, N = 57) = 8.49, p = 0.002, one-tailed.

  28. 74.3% women, with an average age of 45.9 years, and ranging in age from 17 to 73.

  29. t(34) = −5.48, p < 0.001, one-tailed.

  30. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this journal for presenting us with this interesting challenge to the results of some of our studies.

  31. Papineau rejects this case as a possible counterexample to the standard view by arguing that we can only have the same type of pain, not the same token of pain.

  32. 58.8% women, with an average age of 39.7 years, and ranging in age from 16 to 74.

  33. χ2(1, N = 97) = 10.56, p < 0.001, one-tailed.

  34. This result was replicated using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. In this replication, 63.2% (67 out of 106) of the participants responded that Greg had a pain but didn't feel it. 50.0% women, with an average age of 35.9 years, and ranging in age from 22 to 67; χ2(1, N = 106) = 13.72, p < 0.01, one-tailed.

  35. 86.8% women, with an average age of 47.2 years, and ranging in age from 19 to 72.

  36. χ2(1, N = 204) = 1.10, p = 0.146, one-tailed.

  37. 67.4% women, with an average age of 30.3 years, and ranging in age from 16 to 77.

  38. χ2(1, N = 264) = 7.67, p = 0.003, one-tailed.

  39. 83.0% women, with an average age of 50.3 years, and ranging in age from 16 to 84.

  40. χ2(1, N = 106) = 71.41, p < 0.001, one-tailed.

  41. 61.3% women, with an average age of 30.3 years, and ranging in age from 16 to 81.

  42. χ2(1, N = 155) = 83.85, p < 0.001, one-tailed.

  43. 78.4% women, with an average age of 48.4 years, and ranging in age from 26 to 73.

  44. Question 1: χ2(1, N = 51) = 34.59, p < 0.001, one-tailed; Question 2: χ2(1, N = 51) = 28.31, p < 0.001, one-tailed; Question 3: χ2(1, N = 51) = 31.37, p < 0.001, one-tailed; Question 4: χ2(1, N = 51) = 25.41, p < 0.001, one-tailed.

  45. 67.7% women, with an average age of 39.6 years, and ranging in age from 16 to 73.

  46. Question 1: t(61) = 8.96, p < 0.001, one-tailed; Question 2: t(61) = 3.02, p = 0.002, one-tailed; Question 3: t(61) = 5.93, p < 0.001, one-tailed; Question 4: t(61) = 2.94, p = 0.002, one-tailed.

  47. We would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this journal for suggesting this modification.

  48. 51.6% were women, with an average age of 35.6 years, and ranging in age from 21 to 70.

  49. χ2(1, N = 64) = 4.50, p = 0.034, one-tailed.

  50. That said, we believe that follow-up studies involving participants currently undergoing pain, such as patients in pain clinics, would be interesting and would directly address this concern.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by a FHSS JRC Small Grant from Victoria University of Wellington. We would like to thank the audiences at Ruhr University Bochum, University of Glasgow, University of Bern, Victoria University of Wellington, University of Auckland, Nanzan University, as well as the Philosophy of Science Association, the International Congress of Psychology, and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology for their helpful comments.

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  1. Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Philosophy, University of Bern, Länggassstraße 49a, 3012, Bern, Switzerland

    Kevin Reuter

  2. Philosophy Programme, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington, 6140, New Zealand

    Justin Sytsma

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Correspondence to Kevin Reuter.

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Reuter, K., Sytsma, J. Unfelt pain. Synthese 197, 1777–1801 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1770-3

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