The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain by Corns Jennifer

Author:Corns, Jennifer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

It follows, a fortiori, that any physical or objective condition of tissue or body parts is not pain either, even though “we may well appreciate that pain most often has” such a condition as its (distal?) physical cause.5

Despite the ordinary or clinical practice of locating pains in body parts, the dominant ordinary opinion (not just the scientific opinion) is that pains are subjective experiences. As experiences, they don’t admit an appearance/reality distinction: this is why there are no pain hallucinations. In having a pain in my elbow, I am essentially having a pain experience that nevertheless manages to say something about my elbow. If this is correct, then coming to know that one is in pain or is feeling pain in a bodily part is necessarily coming to know that one is having a (mental, what else?) experience. But this is to engage in introspection – one is having epistemic access to one’s experience – a paradigm mental occurrence. Note that there is no parallel in cases like vision: if, on the basis of my visual experience, I come to know that there is an apple in front of me, then this knowledge (that there is an apple in front of me) is perceptual, not introspective – it is epistemic access to the extramental (worldly) reality. Of course, I may also come to know that I am having a visual experience about an apple. This piece of knowledge would be introspective, yes, but this is extra, something in addition to my perceptual knowledge.

How are we to answer our opening question then? My own view is that there is no serious alternative to identifying pains with experiences. This fact is acknowledged even by most perceptualists themselves: on their view, pains are experiences – but, they say, these experiences are perceptual. If pains are experiences, however, our epistemic access to them is, by definition, introspective. For knowledge of one’s own pain is knowledge of one’s own experience, and this is introspective knowledge.

Unfortunately, this settles very little. Deep puzzles remain. If pains are subjective experiences, it is not at all clear what it is that we are doing when we attribute pains to bodily parts. When I feel a sharp pain in my elbow, does it make sense to talk about introspecting a mental item in my elbow?

Compare the situation to seeing the apple in front of me as round. On the basis of my visual experience I make a perceptual judgment “this is round,” where “this” refers to the apple. I am attributing roundness to the apple in front of me. The roundness of the apple won’t be affected when I stop seeing it. Not so with the pain in my elbow. Seeing roundness is perceptual. Awareness of one’s seeing roundness is introspective. In principle, it seems, one can have the former without having the latter: one can see the roundness of an apple without being introspectively aware that one is doing so. The puzzle is that this distinction seems to collapse in the case of feeling a pain in my elbow.

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