2009/01/01 by Murat Aydede · 1 voice
Neuroscience · #Pain Management and Placebo Effect
paper · doi:10.5840/jphil20091061033
openalex publication_date 2009/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
According to the increasingly popular perceptual/representational accounts of pain (and other bodily sensations such as itches, tickles, orgasms, etc.), feeling pain in a body region is perceiving a non-mental property or some objective condition of that region, typically equated with some sort of (actual or potential) tissue damage.I argue that given a natural understanding of what sensory perception requires and how it is integrated with conceptual systems, these accounts are mistaken.I will also examine the relationship between perceptual views and two (weak and strong) forms of representationalism about experience.Strong representationalism is a thesis about the metaphysics of the phenomenal content of perceptual experiences that says that the representational content (externalistically construed) and the phenomenal content of experiences are one and the same so they cannot come apart.I will show how the case of pains (and other similar bodily sensations) poses a serious challenge for strong representationalism.I will argue that strong representationalism fails to meet the challenge.In what follows I will take a detailed look at pain experiences as they play the role of an interface between what these experiences seem to represent (e.g., tissue damage) and our conceptual recognitional capacities (rather like the way visual experiences can be thought of as interfaces between the visible world and how we conceptually react to this world through visual experiences).I will present an account of the particular kind of interplay between these three elements in pain (namely, the tissue damage, sensory experience, and the kind of proprietary concepts this experience gives rise to) and contrast it to the interplay one naturally finds in other sensory modalities such as vision.This contrast constitutes the basis for my argument against perceptualist and strong representationalist views of pain.In the concluding section, I will spell out some of the consequences of my account for theories of introspection, phenomenal concepts, and experiential consciousness.