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Adverbialist perceptual theories

Direct realists reject the act-object analysis of perceptual experiences advanced by sense-datum theorists and other indirect realists. According to most early direct realists (e.g., Ducasse 1952, Sellars 1975), even when visually hallucinating a red apple on the table, one does not directly see a private mental particular or a constellation of mental qualities; rather one is having a visual experience that is like an experience which is normally brought about when one actually sees a real red apple on the table. Direct realists, in other words, typically insist that such cases should not be analyzed in terms of a perceiver standing in a certain perceptual relation to a private mental object or quality. Rather the analysis involves only one particular, the perceiver herself, and her being in certain sorts of (perceptual, experiential) states or conditions that are typically brought about under certain circumstances in which one genuinely perceives something. In standard cases, when one is having a veridical perception, the experiential state of the perceiver is brought about by the actual object of her perception, and the perceiver’s state is qualitatively differentiated by the causal influences of the sensible qualities of the public object. In nonstandard cases like in hallucinations and illusions, phenomenologically the same kinds of states are brought about by different causal routes, and the qualitative differentiation of one’s experiential state in such non-veridical cases is the result of deviant causal influences. (Pitcher 1970, p. 384)

This sort of analysis of experiences is sometimes known as adverbialism in the literature because in perceiving a red object one is said to be in a state of perceiving something “red-ly.” The theoretical import of this way of talking is that perceiving something that is red is a manner of perceiving that object that would be distinct from the manner of perceiving it if the object were blue, in which case one would be perceiving it “blue-ly.” Similarly when one hallucinates a red object, there is only one object, the perceiver who is sensing in a certain manner, namely, red-ly. In other words, ‘red’ is said to qualify not a private object but rather a state or activity of a person, that state being a manner of perceiving or sensing physical objects that are red.[11] For our purposes, keeping up with the general naturalistic motivation behind developing direct realist views, we can take adverbialism as an attempt to get rid of mysterious mental objects or qualities in favor of metaphysically less costly states or activities of persons or manners of perceiving that qualify persons qua subjects of experience. So a pain experience, for a direct realist, is a specific manner in which tissue damage is (somatosensorially) perceived in a bodily region. When we report pain, we report the occurrence of experiences understood this way — adverbially.

Adverbialism of this sort can be effectively combined with intentionalism or representationalism about experience (for more on the connection between adverbialism and representationalism, see Kraut 1982). An adverbialist has to somehow characterize these ways or manners of sensing/perceiving for distinguishing between them, and a natural way to do that is by appealing to the standard or canonical conditions under which those perceptual events are brought about (recall how direct realists want to handle a visual hallucination: one is having a visual experience that is like an experience which is normally brought about when one actually sees a real red apple on the table). Thus it may be reasonable to argue that those canonical conditions are what the specific perceptual events or activities of the persons represent. For instance, it is plausible to claim that a specific perceptual activity constitutes the perception of red (= the perceptual event representing the instantiation of red) because it is the kind of psychological event regularly (canonically) caused by red surfaces — indeed one might expect that the psychophysics of sensory modalities would detail these canonical or standard conditions in objective terms. Although this maneuver is open to direct realists, it is optional. When one takes this option the result is pretty much a strong form of representationalism — for which see next section.

There are various technical difficulties with adverbialism, especially when dealing with phenomenologically complex overall experiences such as having three pains of different qualitative character simultaneously occurring in three different locations in one’s body. It is not clear whether adverbialist approaches can successfully tie the appropriate manners corresponding to different qualities with the right pains or tissue damage on different locations. (See Jackson 1975, 1977 for a detailed criticism of this sort; Tye 1996, pp. 74-77, contains a useful summary.) Furthermore, even when one might successfully get rid of mysterious mental objects like sense-data with this adverbialist move, it is not clear whether adverbialism might still lead to a form of property dualism according to which one is directly aware of certain (non-physical) phenomenological qualities instantiated by experiences realized by brain states. These qualities seem to be required to explain how the manners of different perceptual activities of a perceiver could be differentiated.

There are other sources of resistance to direct perceptual theories of pain and other intransitive bodily sensations. Some objections stem from considerations about whether direct perceptual theories can give adequate accounts of perception in general, so are not specific to their treatment of pain. One of the most frequently discussed worries about direct perceptual theories in general is whether they can do justice to the internalist intuition that perceptual experience is phenomenally rich in a way that cannot be pushed back to the extramental world. In the case of early direct realist like Armstrong and Pitcher, this worry is even more pressing since they were cognitivist about perceptual experience in general; that is, they attempted to explain perception in terms of belief acquisition (or, in terms of acquisition of belief-like cognitive states). But beliefs don’t seem to have the right kind of phenomenology associated with perceptual experiences and bodily sensations (see Everitt 1988 and Grahek 1991 for this kind of criticism). As pointed out earlier, early direct realists played down the importance of experiential phenomenology and sometimes even denied its existence fearing that acknowledging it will lead to the introduction of sense-data or “irreducibly psychic” qualia.[12] But this qualiaphobia drove many away from the early direct perceptual theories (especially those who were not much worried about skepticism and epistemology in general) with the conviction that these theories are not adequate after all for capturing the rich phenomenology of perceptual experiences.

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By links4rank
November 29, 2008

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Direct and indirect perceptual theories of Pain

The perceptual view of pain as presented so far is a view even an indirect realist can subscribe to, although, as a matter of historical fact, very few indirect realists have done so (Perkins 1983, 2006; Maund 2003, 2006). A sense-datum theorist is someone who thinks that all perception of extramental reality is indirect, mediated by a direct perception of sense-data that stand in certain systematic relations to extramental objects in the world in virtue of which sense-data contingently come to represent them. So it is entirely possible, in fact reasonable, to hold that pain sense-data are also representational. In other worlds, direct awareness of pain sense-data could constitute the indirect perception of tissue damage in bodily regions which typically and systematically cause these sense-data.

The reason why this line was not pursued by indirect realists has probably something to do with the intuitive resistance against any perceptual view of pain already embedded in our ordinary conception that we discussed above.[10] Indirect realists like sense-datum theorists, as we have already seen, have the theoretical resources to accommodate the intuitive understanding of pain without forcing it into a perceptualist mold. Without any qualms, they can say that we are directly and immediately aware of pain qua a mental object or quality, whether or not this signals tissue damage. This is to say that they already have a locus of concept application in their theory for the concept of pain: PAIN directly applies to the experience or to its internal direct object, i.e., to either a sense-datum or to its direct awareness. This seems to accommodate all the intuitions embedded in common sense; why go further? Furthermore, if one is not a perceptualist, one doesn’t have an obligation to deal with what we’ll call below the problem of focus, the problem of explaining why there is an asymmetry in conceptual focus between pain and standard exteroception if both are genuinely perceptual.

In practice, almost all defenders of perceptual view of pains are direct realists. If one wants to run a direct realist version of the perceptual theory, however, one immediately runs into the difficulty of finding an appropriate locus for direct perceptual awareness, and for that matter, a locus for immediate concept application; that is, one runs into the difficulty of finding an object, state, or event to which we spontaneously apply PAIN, ITCH, TICKLE, etc., when we are introspectively aware of our pains, itches, tickles, etc., and report them on this basis. This difficulty arises because the mark of any (early) direct realism in the theory of perception is the repudiation of consciously available perceptual intermediaries that mediate standard exteroception: when I see a red apple on the table, there is no object or quality distinct from the apple and its redness such that I see the apple in virtue of seeing it (or more generally, in virtue of directly perceiving or being aware of it). On this view, when I see an apple, I directly perceive, or am directly acquainted with, the apple and its qualities such as its redness. This view works well in veridical perception: the locus of concept application is always the public object of perception, like the apple and its properties. It also explains why the spontaneous concept application is the way it is even when one hallucinates or have illusions: even when one hallucinates a red apple, one is naturally disposed to apply the concept RED APPLE to what one either takes or is tempted to take to be the public object of one’s epistemic efforts and its publicly available features, and rarely to what one believes to be a private mental object or quality.

But how is the repudiation of consciously available perceptual intermediaries to be reconciled with the admission that the concept of pain is the concept of a subjective sensation/experience of a certain sort? Recall that most perceptual theorists admit that introspective reports of pain in body regions are reports of experiences that represent physical disorder of some sort in those regions. This is just to say that when one is in pain one is directly aware of a sensation or experience, i.e., pain. This in turn means that the concepts we are spontaneously prompted to apply in having pains and other intransitive bodily sensations directly apply to the prompting sensations/experiences in the first place — appearances to the contrary. So how to understand the direct realist’s talk of conscious sensations or experiences?

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By links4rank
November 29, 2008

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Pain Perceptual theories

Pain Perceptual theories

Pain Perceptual theories

Because sense-datum theories are most plausible when applied to intransitive bodily sensations, many philosophers, who believe that a naturalist account of ordinary perception can be given without introducing sense-data, have attempted to understand pains and other bodily sensations as species of ordinary perception (exteroception). The so-called perceptual theories of pain are advanced and defended on the hope that pains and other intransitive bodily sensations, contrary to first appearances, are species of information gathering which work on the same principles that govern other sensory modalities for which a successful direct realist account can plausibly be given.

3.1 Introduction

The core commitment of any perceptual view of pain, put as broadly as possible, is that normally, in having or feeling pain, one is perceiving something extramental. In other words, feeling pain normally involves perceiving something in the same sense in which one perceives a red apple when one sees it in good light. It involves exteroception. Sometimes, in ordinary parlance, the term ‘perception’ is used in conjunction with ‘pain’ as in ‘pain perception’ to mean awareness of pain, or just feeling/experiencing pain. This is introspective use of ‘perception’ and should be sharply distinguished from what the perceptual theorists mean when they claim that feeling pain involves perceiving something. They have exteroception in mind, and we’ll use the term always in this sense.

According to perceptual theorists, when one feels, say, a sharp pain in the back of one’s hand, one perceives some physical feature or condition of one’s hand. The proper modality for this perception is somatosensory, similar to the sensory modality of touch or proprioception (the sensory modality internal to one’s body that informs one about the position and movement of one’s body and body parts). Most perceptual theorists identify this feature with tissue damage or some condition of the tissue that would likely result in damage if sustained in that condition. More abstractly, it is some sort of physical disorder due to some tissue trauma, irritation, inflammation, or some such pathological condition, or a condition close to such. It is also possible to identify the object of perception in pain with the activation of nociceptors innervating the damaged or irritated tissue. (Nociceptors are peripheral nerve endings specialized to respond, normally, only to potentially damaging stimuli, i.e., to nociceptive stimuli). Let’s use ‘tissue damage’ as a stand-in for whatever physical disorderly condition of bodily tissue is being perceived in feeling pain according to perceptual theorists. Normally, when we talk about the location of a pain, we are talking about the location of this perceptual object, i.e., the location where the tissue damage is occurring or about to occur.

Perceptual theories of pain as alternatives to sense-datum theories were first explicitly stated and philosophically developed in the 1960’s. The most influential and prominent defenders were Armstrong (1962; 1968) and Pitcher (1970; 1971). There were others, but in terms of setting the tone and philosophical agenda for the subsequent discussion for decades to come, it is fair to say that no one has surpassed their enormous influence.[9] At the time, the dominant view was that pains and other intransitive bodily sensations are not perceptual at all, they were conceived to be sensations or experiences (à la sense-datum theories) that are reliably caused by (actual or impending) injury or damage to body tissue or internal organs. They are thus useful warning signals, but they don’t have much in common with standard ways of perceiving extramental world. This view has still some defenders today: although the conception of pains as sense-data has been largely abandoned, those who are not sympathetic to perceptual theories still hold what might be called the “sensation or qualia view of pain”, according to which pain is not a phenomenal object but a phenomenal quality of one’s experience, or alternatively, it is a subjective experience with certain qualia or qualitative character that one is directly aware of when in pain. With this adjustment from object to quality kept in mind, most of what we have said about sense-datum theories above can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the qualia view of pain.

3.2 The appearance/reality problem

The main source of resistance to a perceptual view of pains comes from the common-sense conception of pain according to which pains are sensations with essential privacy, subjectivity, self-intimation, and incorrigibility. These apparently essential features of pains pose difficulties for any perceptual theory. Indeed, they can be used in advancing anti-perceptualist arguments whose general form can be put in the following way. Genuine perception always involves the possibility of misperceiving the perceptual object that is not essentially private and subjective. In other words, there is always an appearance/reality distinction applicable to the objects of genuine perception which gives rise to the possibility that the perceptual appearance of this object misleads us about what the object is like in reality. The main reason for this is that these objects have a reality beyond their appearances. They are thus public objects and capable of existing on their own without anyone’s perception of them. But feeling pain has none of these features. Therefore, it cannot be genuine perception.

So, how do the perceptual theorists handle this objection, which lies behind the intuitive resistance to treating pain as a form of perception? Given the core commitment of perceptual views (namely, that feeling pain involves perceiving something extramental), one might think that perceptual theorists identify pain with tissue damage. Indeed, if one takes this view, the above objection seems almost decisive against it. But relatively few defenders actually take this route — among the most notable are Newton (1989), Stephens and Graham (1987), and Hill (2004, 2006). Most others, including Armstrong and Pitcher, bowed to common-sense understanding of pain and identified pains with pain experiences or sensations, understood in a direct realist fashion. If pains are identified with experiences, not with their causes (i.e., tissue damage), then the above objection seems to disappear (but see below).

It is primarily for this reason that most perceptual theorists identify feeling pain with having an experience in the first place — just as the pain scientists do (see IASP definition above) following the second thread in our ordinary conception of pain. But this is the experience mediating or involved in the perception of tissue damage. In other words, they grant that the (dominant) concept of pain is the concept of a subjective experience, but they insist that this experience is essentially perceptual: it constitutes our perception of tissue damage. Compare the situation with seeing. In seeing a red apple in good light, I am having a visual experience which is perceptual: it constitutes my seeing the red apple. The difference lies not in the flow of information, but in the locus of our interest and conceptual identification directly induced by the perceptual experience. According to most perceptual theorists, we apply the concept of pain, PAIN, primarily to the perceptual experience we are having, not to the object of this experience, i.e., tissue damage (even though, as discussed above, common sense also uses confusingly the same word ‘pain’ to indicate where the tissue damage might be occurring by applying it to a bodily location — more on this shortly). In other words, ‘pain’ names a subjective experience. In vision, however, the locus of conceptual identification is different: normally it is the object of our visual experience we are interested in, say, a red apple seen in good light and identified as such. Thus, we both perceptually and conceptually focus on it and its visible properties such as its redness, roundness, etc., by applying our concepts, RED, ROUND, APPLE, to it on the basis of our visual experience. Of course, we are sometimes interested in and can focus and report on our visual experiences too, but this happens usually when we are not sure about what we are seeing.

(In what follows, it is useful to denote concepts by capitalized words that name them. So, for instance, ‘RED’ denotes the concept of red which in turn expresses the property of being red. In other words, RED expresses the property of being red, or redness in short. Even though here I assume for convenience a representationalist framework for concepts according to which concepts are mental representations realized in the brain — which is the psychologist’s preferred reading, nothing of any importance hangs on this: the reader may substitute his or her own preferred interpretation of how concepts are to be understood. For instance, concepts may be merely certain sorts of mental or behavioral capacities that are functionally or dispositionally characterized.)

There is thus an asymmetry in our spontaneous reaction to incoming stimuli in seeing and having pain; that is, our spontaneous interest and focus directly resulting from the perceptual experiences is different in each case. We can represent this asymmetry with a schematic (Figure 1).

 
Figure 1: There is asymmetry in concept application even when it is assumed that the structure of information flow is symmetrical in the contrast cases.

Thus the incorrigibility mentioned before reduces to one’s incorrigibility about one’s occurrent experiences. To the extent to which we are incorrigible in discriminating and conceptually identifying our own experiences, to that extent we cannot be wrong about our own pains. Hence the locus of concept application are the pain experiences, even though it might seem to us as if we were applying the concept of pain to bodily locations (see below). It follows that hallucinations or illusions are possible, in one sense, not about feeling/experiencing pain, but about whether these experiences’ correctly representing some tissue damage, i.e., the object of perception in feeling pain.

The privacy and subjectivity of pains are explained similarly. If pains are experiences, they cannot exist without being the state of someone’s mind. In other words, they exist insofar as one has them: they are mental states or events, hence essentially mind-dependent. The privacy of pains again reduces to the privacy of experiences. There may be philosophical problems about how privacy, subjectivity and incorrigibility are possible in a completely physical world, but if there are such problems, they are general problems about having perceptual experience of any kind, not necessarily pertaining to pains and other intransitive bodily sensations.

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November 29, 2008

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Pain Sense-datum theories

Standard perception (exteroception) can be analyzed as involving the perception (act) of a public object. The perceptual act on the part of the perceiving subject, in turn, is analyzed as involving an experience which typically induces conceptual categorization, i.e., application of concepts to the object of perception and its qualities — not to the experience. Thus perceptual experiences seem transparent to the perceiver, who may be said to perceive the extramental reality directly, without first perceiving or somehow being aware of the experience itself or its qualities. This view is supported by common sense and is typically called naive or direct realism.

According to the indirect realists, this directness is an illusion; we are in fact directly aware of experiential intermediaries, and we perceive the extramental world only indirectly, in virtue of being directly aware of these intermediaries. Most early indirect realists (e.g., Moore 1903, 1939; Russell 1912; Price 1950) thought of these intermediaries as phenomenal or mental particulars, typically called sense-data. Consider a hallucination of a red apple. Intuitively, the person having the hallucination seems to see something. This something is not, of course, an apple. But it is an object, according to sense-datum theorists, which is shaped like an apple and is really red. It is a sense-datum, a phenomenal (mental) individual which really has the qualities that it visually appears to have. Sense-data, however, are no ordinary objects: they are private, subjective, self-intimating, and the source of incorrigible knowledge. According to sense-datum theorists, sense-data are internal to one’s consciousness: they are not before one’s sense-organs. These theories claim that there is a hidden act-object structure in the perceptual awareness itself. Every perceptual awareness involves the act of being aware of phenomenal objects that characterize this perceptual awareness, whether or not this awareness is an hallucination or a veridical perception of external objects.

So on sense-datum theories, one perceives external objects and their qualities, indirectly by directly perceiving (being aware of, or acquainted with) sense-data internal to one’s consciousness that resemble in various degrees the physical objects that cause them. According to sense-datum theorists, however, we are rarely, if ever, aware of this indirection in ordinary (veridical) exteroception. It is only critical philosophical reflection on features of perceptual awareness that reveals that the indirection must occur. The importance of pain and other (intransitive) bodily sensations lies in the fact that the indirection seems to be easily revealed introspectively as is shown by our unwillingness to identify the pain we attribute to body parts with anything physical in those parts.

Whatever merits sense-datum theories might have with respect to genuine perception and misperception, its attraction seems undeniable when it comes to its treatment of pains and other “intransitive” bodily sensations like itches, tickles, tingles, etc.[4] According to many sense-datum theorists, pains are paradigm examples of phenomenal individuals, mental objects with phenomenal qualities whose existence depends on their being sensed or felt, and thus are logically private to their owners who feel them. This position presumably explains why we have the act-object duality or ambiguity in pain talk that we discussed earlier: pains qua localizable objects cannot exist without the corresponding acts, i.e., without someone’s acts of experiencing them (Broad 1959).[5] In other words, the concept of pain plausibly applies to both the object part of the act-object pair and to the act of being directly aware of these objects.

The puzzle of locating pains in body parts can be treated in more than one way within this framework. The most straightforward way is simply to take the phenomena at face value and say that pains as mental objects or sense-data are literally located where they seem to be located in body parts or even in empty space where one’s limb would have been, say, before the amputation. That pains are mental particulars and depend for their existence on being sensed apparently does not logically preclude their being capable of having, literally, a spatial location (see Jackson 1977 for this line).[6]

A second and more popular way of handling the location problem is to say that even though pains cannot literally be located in physical space, they can have location in a phenomenal space or field that is somehow isomorphic or systematically related to their counterparts (say, tissue damage) in physical space. In fact, this move would also work for visual sense-data that require some spatiotemporal framework. In the case of bodily sensations, this phenomenal space is sometimes called one’s somatic field by analogy to a visual field that maps onto physical space (Price 1950).

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November 29, 2008

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tension between something in a body part and subjective experience

Now that the two threads in our ordinary conception of pain are in full view, we can better appreciate why they are in tension. Experiences are in the head, if they are anywhere. Indeed, for most physicalists, they are in the head by being realized in the brain or in the central nervous system. So we can’t be locating pains qua experiences (or qua sensations, for that matter) in body parts when we correctly utter sentences such as (1) through (6) — discounting headaches perhaps. But then what are we locating when we seem to attribute pains to body parts? Recall that, although the first thread in our common-sense conception treats pains as spatiotemporally locatable particulars or particular conditions of body parts, it does not identify pains with them — it only exerts pressure towards such an identification in the light of the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any other credible alternative (but see below). We have already conducted a little thought-experiment to bring this out in Section 1.1. Comparing the following two sentences will help us understand the tension better:

(5) I feel a sharp pain in the back of my right hand
(9) I see a dark discoloration on the back of my right hand.

It is reasonably clear that for (9) to be true, I have to stand in the seeing (perceiving) relation to a dark discoloration in the back of my right hand, i.e., to a certain surface region on the back of my hand marked by a darker shade of the usual color of my skin, a certain region that can be seen by others possibly in the same way in which I see it. Note that if I am hallucinating a dark discoloration on the back of my hand, then (9) is simply false. Also note that although the truth of (9) doesn’t require the possession of any concept by me expressed by the words making up the sentence, my uttering of (9) to make a report typically does — if we take such utterances as expressions of one’s thoughts and take thoughts to be composed of concepts. So my seeing would typically induce me to conceptually identify something on the back of my hand as a dark discoloration. This is a typical case of categorization of something extramental under a concept induced by an exteroceptive experience. Of course, my uttering of (9) does more than attribute a physical property to a bodily region, it also reports that I am seeing it.

What has to be the case for (5) to be true? Whatever the complete analysis of sentences like (5) turns out to be, one thing seems reasonably clear: the truth-conditions of (5) put no constraints whatsoever on how things physically are with my hand. Anyone who has a sufficient mastery of our ordinary concept of pain has no difficulty in understanding how (5) could still be true even though there is nothing physically wrong with my hand, which is typically the case in centrally caused chronic pain syndromes.[2]

So we standardly use sentences like (5) to make correct statements about a pain felt in a bodily location even when there is nothing wrong with that location. In other words, when we make claims about where it hurts (attribute pain to bodily locations), strictly speaking we in fact rescind from logically committing ourselves to there being anything physically wrong in those locations — even though we normally expect to find some physical disorder in them. Compare this to my uttering (9) on the basis of my having a very vivid visual hallucination of a discoloration on the back of my hand. In such a case, my utterance would be incorrect, because in uttering (9) I commit myself to finding some physical condition (namely, a dark discoloration) on the back of my hand. If and when I realize that I have hallucinated, then I correct myself and revert to introspective mode by saying things like “I seemed to see a discoloration on the back of my hand” or “it appeared to me that there was a discoloration,” etc. Nothing of this sort happens when I realize or am told that there is nothing physically wrong with my hand: I still correctly continue to report the pain I feel there by uttering the very same sentence, (5), or its equivalents. I don’t need to make any correction in my pain report. This shows that despite the pressure exerted by the first thread, it is the second thread that seems to capture the dominant common-sense conception of pain — as indeed the IASP definition above indicates.

Still the puzzle remains: what is it that I am doing when I appear to be attributing something to the back of my hand by correctly uttering (5) — if, as agreed, I am not attributing a mental experience or a physical condition there? It is not clear whether there is a common-sense answer to this question. Just as the scientific definition doesn’t touch on the issue of our common practice of correctly locating pains in healthy body parts, the common sense would probably draw a blank if the problem were articulated explicitly and the question is pressed really hard.

Or maybe not. Intuitively and somewhat naively, what common sense would drive us to say when pressed hard might be something like the following.[3] Granted, by uttering (5) I am not attributing any sort of physical thing or condition to the back of my hand, nor am I locating a mental experience there — experiences and sensations are strictly speaking in the head if they are anywhere. But when I attend to my hand with my mind’s inner eye, so to speak, I clearly feel something there. I can introspectively examine different qualities of that thing such as its sharpness, volume, intensity, unpleasantness, burning quality, etc. I can in real time follow the changes in it: it is now somewhat less intense and unpleasant, now more; it is getting duller now, it was sharper and brighter a moment ago; it seems to be moving toward my fingers, etc. Clearly, I seem to be confronted or acquainted with something that I can introspectively examine carefully in real time and report on its various qualities. It is this thing, the object of my inner attention, which is located in the back of my hand, which seems essentially private, subjective, and about which I can’t be wrong.

If this is what one might like to say intuitively and naívely, one should be prepared to swallow its strange consequences: this object of my inner attention is both located in public space and logically private, i.e., only I can have epistemic access to it despite its being spatiotemporally located. Also, the existence of this object seems to literally depend on my epistemic/mental access to it: it seems to go out of existence when I cease to feel it (perceive it). In addition, if it is the object of my attention (separate from my attention), how could it be the case that I cannot be wrong about it? And importantly, if this object is not physical, what sort of thing could it be? A ghostly mental particular that I can introspectively attend to which is nevertheless spatiotemporally located beyond my head?

The act-object duality embedded in our ordinary concept of pain yields strange results when followed intuitively and naively to its logical end. But perhaps this duality is a robust symptom of a deeper truth underlying all perception and introspection. Perhaps pain is simply the most paradigmatic example of a broad range of perceptual experiences where this deep underlying iceberg shows it tip most prominently and revealingly — albeit confusedly. Indeed this is exactly the case according to so-called sense-datum theories, or more broadly, indirect realism.

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By links4rank
November 29, 2008

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pain as subjective experience

That pain is a subjective experience seems to be a truism. Given our common-sense understanding of pain, this seems to be the more dominant thread: instead of treating pains as objects of perceptual experience, it treats them as experiences themselves. Indeed it is this thread that the official scientific definition of ‘pain’ picks up and emphasizes, which was first formulated in the 1980s by a committee organized by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), and has been, since then, widely accepted by the scientific community:[1]

Pain: An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.

Note: Pain is always subjective. Each individual learns the application of the word through experiences related to injury in early life… Experiences which resemble pain, e.g., pricking, but are not unpleasant, should not be called pain. Unpleasant abnormal experiences (dysaesthesia) may also be pain but are not necessarily so because, subjectively, they may not have the usual sensory qualities of pain. Many people report pain in the absence of tissue damage or any likely pathological cause; usually this happens for psychological reasons. There is no way to distinguish their experience from that due to tissue damage if we take the subjective report. If they regard their experience as pain and if they report it in the same ways as pain caused by tissue damage, it should be accepted as pain. This definition avoids tying pain to the stimulus. 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. (IASP 1986, p. 250); Cf. (IASP-Task-Force-On-Taxonomy 1994)

Like other experiences as conscious episodes, pains are thought to be private, subjective, self-intimating, and the source of incorrigible knowledge. These elements can certainly be found in the IASP characterization, which also adds that pain experiences are unpleasant. Indeed, by emphasizing that pain is always a “psychological state” the note warns against a conception of pain suggested by the first thread above.

Interestingly, however, when we talk about pains as experiences, we also, in the same breath, talk about feeling them as if these experiences were also the object of some sort of inner perception, which suggests introspection. Indeed the discussion of privacy, subjectivity, self-intimation, and incorrigibility naturally forces us to talk this way.

Pains are said to be private to their owners in the strong sense that no one else can epistemically access one’s pain in the way one has access to one’s own pain, namely by feeling it and coming to know one is feeling it on that basis. This sharply contrasts with the public nature of objects of standard perception, i.e., perception of one’s immediate extramental environment including one’s body. Let’s call this exteroception, to contrast with introspection which is access to one’s intra-mental activity. So, for instance, the very same apple I see on the table can be seen by others in possibly the exact way I see it, so is not private in this sense.

Pains also seem to be subjective in the sense that their existence depends on feeling them. There is an air of paradox when someone talks about unfelt pains. One is naturally tempted to say that if a pain is not being felt by its owner then it does not exist. Again compare the subjectivity of pains to the objectivity of the objects of standard exteroception. The apple I see does not depend on my perceiving it in order to exist: (pace Berkeley and phenomenalists) its existence is independent of my, or for that matter anyone else’s, seeing it.

Not only people seem to have a special epistemic access to their pains, they seem to have a very special epistemic authority with respect to their pain: they seem to be incorrigible, or even infallible, about their pains and pain reports: necessarily, if I sincerely believe that I am in pain, then I am in pain. Conversely, if I feel pain, then I know that I am in pain. Again this conditional seems necessarily true. This is the self-intimating aspect of pain experiences.

In short, there doesn’t seem to be any room for a possible gap between the appearance of pain and being in pain (i.e., no appearance/reality distinction applicable to pain). As Kripke famously put it:

To be in the same epistemic situation that would obtain if one had a pain is to have a pain; to be in the same epistemic situation that would obtain in the absence of pain is not to have a pain…. Pain … is not picked out by one of its accidental properties; rather it is picked out by its immediate phenomenological quality…. If any phenomenon is picked out in exactly the same way that we pick out pain, then that phenomenon is pain. (Kripke 1980, pp. 152-53)

If there is no appearance/reality distinction applicable to pain, then it seems that one cannot be mistaken about one’s beliefs about one’s pain formed on the basis of feeling pain in the way one can be mistaken about the existence and properties of the apple one sees. In the latter case, appearances can be misleading precisely because the perceptual appearance of an apple might not correspond to what the apple is like in reality. In apparent contrast to pain, normal exteroception always involves the possibility of misperception, and thus miscategorization (i.e., misapplication of concepts to the objects of exteroception).

Posted in Fioricet. Tagged with , , , , .

By links4rank
November 29, 2008

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What is Pain?

Pain is the most prominent member of a class of sensations known as bodily sensations, which includes itches, tickles, tingles, orgasms, and so on. Bodily sensations are typically attributed to bodily locations and appear to have features such as volume, intensity, duration, and so on, that are ordinarily attributed to physical objects or quantities. Yet these sensations are often thought to be logically private, subjective, self-intimating, and the source of incorrigible knowledge for those who have them. Hence there appear to be reasons both for thinking that pains (along with other similar bodily sensations) are physical objects or conditions that we perceive in body parts, and for thinking that they are not. This paradox is one of the main reasons why philosophers are especially interested in pain. One increasingly popular but still controversial way to deal with this paradox is to defend a perceptual or representational view of pain, according to which feeling pain is in principle no different than undergoing other standard perceptual processes like seeing, hearing, touching, etc. But there are many who think that pains are not amenable to such a treatment.

Posted in Pain Resources. Tagged with , , , .

By links4rank
November 29, 2008

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