Pain

Abstract

Pain is the most prominent member of a class of sensations known asbodily sensations, which includes itches, tickles, tingles, orgasms,and so on. Bodily sensations are typically attributed to bodilylocations and appear to have features such as volume, intensity,duration, and so on, that are ordinarily attributed to physicalobjects or quantities. Yet these sensations are often thought to belogically private, subjective, self-intimating, and the source ofincorrigible knowledge for those who have them. Hence there appear tobe reasons both for thinking that pains (along with other similarbodily sensations) are physical objects or conditions that we perceivein body parts, and for thinking that they are not. This apparentparadox is one of the main reasons why philosophers are especiallyinterested in pain. One increasingly popular but still controversialway to deal with this apparent paradox is to defend a perceptual orrepresentational view of pain, according to which feeling pain is inprinciple no different from undergoing other standard perceptualprocesses like seeing, hearing, touching, etc. But there are many whothink that pains are not amenable to such a treatment. Although it wasthe treatment of pain as a sensory-discriminative experience that haddominated the philosophical discussions throughout most of thetwentieth century, attention to pains’ affective-motivationaldimension has gained prominence in recent years.