The Perceptual View of Pain: An Urgent Question in the Philosophy of Mind

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to present the state of the art of the philosophical debates about pain and demonstrate its importance in the current Philosophy of Mind; my contention is that it is an important point of convergence between the research done in cognitive sciences and philosophical thought. The central point of discussion is whether pain is a form of perception, in the sense that it can give us information about the (disordered) state of our own body. The substantiality of this view has to be confronted with what common sense intuitively ascribes to pain: (i) Its privacy: you cannot feel my pain and I cannot feel yours; (ii) Its existence always depends on the existence of a subject who feels it: there is no such thing as an unfelt pain; (iii) Its incorrigibility: there is an unquestionable epistemic authority of the subject who is in pain. These three features seem to reduce pain to an exclusively mental phenomenon that is difficult to reconcile with a perceptual view of pain. There are two main positions when facing this problematic issue if the perceptual view of pain is to be sustained: (a) Defend that it is, in fact, a false problem. Those three features are also found in other forms of perception, like vision (to use the most common example). Pain, being a highly complex phenomenon, only intensifies them. (b) Demonstrate, supported by data given by the cognitive sciences, that our common sense conception of pain can be put at risk by attending to specific cases like individuals with mirrortouch synaesthesia, for example. I will present the most significant answers – related to both (a) and (b) – given by some of the contemporary philosophers of mind, namely, George Pitcher, Michael Tye, Murat Aydede and Daniel Dennett.