ARE PAINS FEELINGS? .docx

ARE PAINS FEELINGS? (forthcoming in The Monist, issue on Pain) “Pain is a feeling. Surely that is uncontroversial.” So commented David Lewis at the end of his essay, “Mad Pain and Martian Pain” (1983, p. 130). Alas, not everyone agrees. If pain is a feeling then pains are instances of feeling; but according to some philosophers, pains are mental objects of feelings, not themselves feelings at all. Consider the case of heat. Heat is one thing; the feeling of heat another. Heat can be present without any feeling of heat – perhaps there are no sentient creatures around to feel the heat or perhaps the few sentient creatures left have insensitive and defective heat receptors in their skin. Similarly, the feeling of heat can be present without any heat – perhaps I have been given a drug that makes me feel hot even though my body temperature is normal or perhaps my brain is being probed and the neuronal activity I undergo makes me feel heat in my toes without there really being any. It’s not like this for pain. Pain cannot be present without any feeling of pain. In the absence of any sentient creatures, there is no pain. Also, the feeling of pain cannot be present without pain. If I am in pain, I feel pain, and if I feel pain, I am in pain. That’s an end to it. Why is the case of pain unlike that of heat in the above ways? The obvious answer is that pain, unlike heat, is a feeling. There aren’t two things, pain and the feeling of pain. There is just one described in two different ways. If pain is a feeling, then token pains – my pain in my elbow right now, Samantha’s headache at midnight – must be token feelings. This explains nicely 1 why you cannot feel my pains and I cannot feel yours. You and I cannot feel the other’s token feelings. You and I can have feelings that feel the same to both of us; but neither of us can have the very token feelings the other has. There is nothing unique or peculiar about feelings here. I cannot die your death or laugh or your laugh, and neither can you die my death or laugh my laugh. The deeper explanation for these facts, I suggest, is simply that the subjects of events are essential to them. So, Lewis, in my view, was right. The rest of this paper fends off a variety of objections. 1. The Objections First objection: Isn’t a pain in a finger something that is in a finger and thus inside the finger? No token feeling is found inside any finger. Reply: Agreed, no feeling is spatially inside any finger; but then a pain in a finger is not spatially inside a finger either. If it were then, given the transitivity of being inside, the following argument would be valid: 1) I have a pain in my finger 2) My finger is in my mouth So, 3) I have a pain in my mouth. And patently, this argument is not valid. Furthermore, there is the well-known phenomenon of phantom pain, summarized below by Nikolajsen and Jensen (2001). 2  The first medical description of post‐amputation sensation was given by Ambroise Paré (1510–1590), a French military surgeon, who noticed that patients may complain of severe pain in the missing limb following amputation….In modern times, traumatic amputations originating from World War I and II, Vietnam and Israeli wars and from landmine explosions all over the world are a tragic cause of phantom pain in otherwise healthy people. Other major reasons for amputation and phantom pain are peripheral vascular disease and neoplasms. Today, it is common knowledge that virtually all amputees experience phantom sensations, painful or not, after limb amputation. Non‐painful phantom sensations rarely pose a clinical problem. However, in some amputees, the phantom becomes the site of severe pain, which may be exceedingly difficult to treat. (p. 107) In phantom pain (or phantom limb pain), there is pain in a limb that no longer exists. This would not be possible if having a pain in a limb involved any sort of spatial relation between the pain and the limb. Second objection: You cannot really have a pain in your left leg if your left leg has been amputated. But you can feel a pain there. You can have a ‘pain in your left leg’ feeling, with or without a left leg. So, pain is distinct from feeling pain. Reply: The temptation to say that you cannot really have a pain in your left leg if you lack a left leg extends equally to the claim that you cannot really feel a pain in your left leg without such a leg. It has nothing to do with any distinction 3 between having a pain and feeling a pain. Rather it derives from the use of a definite description within an intensional context. Suppose you and I are listing creatures in Austin we fear. You say that you fear my cat. I say that I fear the dog next door. You then point out to me that actually there is no dog next door. Given this context, we can agree that I don't really fear the dog next door, for there is no such dog to fear. Here effectively we give the description ‘the dog next door’ wide scope and so we interpret the claim that I fear the dog next door as saying that the dog next door is such that I fear it. So, given that there is no dog next door, the claim is false. Suppose, however, you and I are listing phobias. Among other things, I tell you that I fear the dog next door. My fear here is real even if there is no such dog. Given this context, it is true that I fear the dog next door. This is possible because the definite description is now taking narrow scope relative to the psychological verb. Corresponding remarks apply to the case of your feeling a pain in your left leg. If you assert that you feel such a pain, I may reply, “Don’t be silly! You no longer have a left leg.” In so replying, I am taking the expression ‘my left leg’ in your report, ‘I feel a pain in my left leg,’ to have wide scope. But I may also agree with your remark, knowing full well that you appreciate that your left leg is missing. Given this background presupposition, I am giving ‘my left leg’ narrow scope. What goes for feeling a pain in your left leg goes for having a pain in your left leg. When you complain of having severe pain in your left leg, I need not 4 correct you. I can take your report to be expressing a truth, just as in the case of feeling a pain in your left leg. Third objection: Pains lack representational content. Bodily feelings have such content: I can feel that my leg is being bitten by mosquitoes, for example, whether or not it is; but I cannot have a pain that anything is the case. So, pains cannot be bodily feelings. Reply: The medical passage quoted earlier allows that there can be severe pain in a limb that no longer exists. The natural explanation of such a possibility is that pains have representational content, and phantom limb pain is a case of misrepresentation. Admittedly, no one can have a pain that anything is the case. But this is because ‘that-clauses’ after psychological verbs in English express conceptual contents. For example, if I see that there is a telescope before me, I must have the concept telescope; likewise, if I smell that the apple tart is burning, I must have the concept apple. And if I feel that my leg is being bitten by mosquitoes, I must have the concept mosquito. When I feel pain, I do not feel that anything is the case. My pain has no conceptual content. It is not a state like belief or seeing that or smelling that. But not all bodily feelings are feelings that so-and-so is the case, any more than all cases of seeing are seeings that so-and-so is the case. Consider the case of visual perception. When you see something, it looks some way to you. And in looking some way to you, your visual experience represents it as being some way. The seen object need not be that way, of course. The case may be one of illusion. But your visual experience, rightly or 5 wrongly, ‘tells’ you that it is that way. Many of the features our visual experiences represent are fixed by our phylogenetic nature. We do not choose how things look to us at the most fundamental level and neither can we change it by learning.1 Visual experiences represent many features nonconceptually. In so doing, they provide us with information about our environment, information our cognitive centers can use in forming beliefs about the world in which we live. Pains are bodily feelings. As such, it is plausible to think of them as providing us with information about disturbances in our bodies, and doing so by representing such disturbances. Mother Nature has seen to it that we have such information since it is useful to us. It helps us to adapt and survive. A pain in a leg, as noted earlier, is a token of a certain type of feeling. The relevant feeling (nonconceptually) represents the presence of a certain sort of disturbance (paradigmatically, tissue damage) occurring in (or on the surface of) the leg. In saying that the pain is in a leg, we speak as if the pain itself is inside the leg, when in reality it is a representation that represents something else inside (or on the surface of) the leg. Such talk is common. A drowning feeling is not itself drowning. Rather it is a feeling that represents to its subject that he or she is drowning. An out-of-the-body experience can be had by one who is in her body. Such an experience only represents its subject as out of her body; and this is presumably a case of misrepresentation. An oscilloscope reading may be described as loud by someone who works with such readings. But it isn’t literally 1 However, we can change how things look even at the most fundamental level by shifting our attention. The Necker cube, for example, looks different as the viewer shifts his/her attention from one face of the cube to another. 6 loud. It represents something loud. Correspondingly, a pain in a leg is a feeling that is in a leg only in the sense that it represents something (to wit, a disturbance) in a leg.2 Fourth objection: The way we talk about pains suggests that pains are not feelings. The surface grammar of a statement of the form 4) Tom feels a pain suggests that the logical form is: 4a) (Ex)(x is a pain and Tom feels x). (4a), in turn, suggests that pains are objects of feeling, things to which we are related in feeling them. In this respect, (4) is like 5) Tom hits a ball. (5) evidently has the logical form: 5a) (Ex)(x is a ball and Tom hits x). Hitting is one thing; the thing hit another. Likewise, feeling is one thing, the thing felt – in this case – a pain another. Reply: The analogy with (5) is forced. Balls can exist un-hit and different people can hit the same ball. Not so with pains. Pains aren’t objects distinct from feelings in the way that balls are objects distinct from hittings. A better analogy for (4) is (6) Tom dies a violent death. In the case of (6), the logical form is plausibly taken to be (6a) (Ex)(x is a dying and x is violent and Tom undergoes x). 2 This shouldn't be taken to imply that some thing is such that the pain represents it as being in a leg. See the reply to objection eight below. 7 Correspondingly, for (4) we have: (4b) (Ex)(x is a feeling and x is painful and Tom undergoes x). Deaths don't exist as objects of dyings and pains don't exist as objects of feelings. All that is required for (6) to be true is that there be a certain event Tom undergoes. The same is true for (4). Fifth objection: If (4) is analyzed as (4b) then pains don't really exist any more than do deaths or smiles. Just as there are only acts of dying and smiling, so too, on the account being proposed, there are only events of feeling. But then pain is not a feeling, and Lewis’ remark quoted at the outset is false. Reply: Deaths do exist. They are events, acts of dying. If Tom died gruesomely at midnight, his death was gruesome and occurred at midnight. This is no coincidence. His death is one and the same as the event of his dying and that was gruesome and took place at midnight. Pains exist too. They are mental events of feeling. Sixth objection: ‘Feeling’ is a count noun like ‘tiger’; but it is not a mass term like ‘water’. ‘Pain’ is both. We talk of pains plural and we also say, for example, that there is a lot of pain in the world. So, pain cannot simply be identified with a certain sort of feeling. Reply: ‘Feeling’ is sometimes a mass term. We say such things as that Tom has lost all feeling in his left arm, that Jane has full feeling in her left leg but little in her right, that phantom limbs are sometimes the site of severe pain, and so on. 8  Seventh objection: Pains are rather like after-images. We say that we have after-images as we say that we have pains. We also say that we experience or ‘see’ after-images as we say that we experience or feel pains. But it is very implausible to claim that after-images are themselves experiences. An after-image can be red and round, for example. But no visual experience is red or round. If it is implausible to hold that after-images are experiences, isn’t it equally implausible to hold that pains are feelings? Better to say that both are mental objects. Reply: If we hold that after-images are objects of experience, we face the puzzle of privacy and the puzzle of ownership, noted earlier in connection with pains. Why can’t you experience my after-images or I yours (the puzzle of privacy)? Why can’t there be an after-image that belongs to no creature at all (the puzzle of ownership)? Given that after-images aren’t experiences, the obvious account of after-images is that they don't really exist. When I have a red, round after-image, I experience something red and round, and I do so as a result of staring at a green light. But I can experience something red and round even though there is no red, round thing I experience just as I can desire something that lasts forever, even if nothing does. Those who reify after-images make the mistake of inferring from (7) I experience something red and round, via exportation of the quantifier from inside the scope of ‘experience’ to outside, the following statement: (8) Something red and round is such that I experience it. 9 Exportation here is evidently a mistake. In the case of pains, it is not in the least evident that pains are not feelings in the way that it is evident that after-images are not experiences. 3 On the contrary, the natural, pre-theoretic view, is that pain is a feeling. An intense pain is simply an intensely painful feeling. So, the analogy with the case of after- images collapses. Eighth objection: If you feel a throbbing pain in your first finger and a burning pain in your thumb, there are two different things you feel: a throbbing pain in your first finger and a burning pain in your thumb. As far as your awareness goes, there are two different objects, not two different simultaneous feelings. Unfortunately, if we do away with mental objects, we must multiply feelings; for it we do not, we cannot distinguish the case of feeling a throbbing pain in the first finger and a burning pain in the thumb from that of feeling a burning pain in the first finger and a throbbing pain in the thumb. A feeling that is throbbing and painful and in the first finger and burning and painful and in the thumb is the same as a feeling that is burning and painful and in the first finger and throbbing and painful and in the thumb (by commutation of conjuncts). Reply: There are two simultaneous token feelings here, a throbbing, painful, first finger feeling and a burning, painful, thumb feeling. This is unproblematic, however. When you introspect, you are not aware of either token feeling any more than when you introspect a visual experience of a red tomato on the table before you, you are aware of a token visual experience. In the latter 3 In my 1995, I held that pains and after-images go together across the board. So, I held that after-images are experiences. I no longer maintain that the two cases are alike in all respects. 10 case, you are aware of the tomato and the color red, and thereby you are aware of the fact that you have a visual experience of a red tomato on the table before you. But you are not aware of the token visual experience. 4 In the pain case, you are aware of your thumb and also of your first finger, and you are aware of various qualities you experience as being instantiated there, qualities you dislike. Some of these qualities you experience as being in your thumb and others as being in your first finger. They are qualities of disturbances in your thumb and first finger, if they are qualities of anything at all. 5 By being 4 This is an illustration of the phenomenon of transparency for visual experience. For more here, see Harman 1990; Dretske 1995; also Tye 1995 and Tye 2014. 5 One quality that is represented by the feeling of pain (in normal cases), and that is often ignored, is what we might call “felt badness”. If I feel a pain in my thumb, the disturbance in my thumb (of which I am aware) feels bad. It is because it feels bad that I want it to go away. Chocolate, by contrast, in normal cases tastes good. That is why people usually like it. For more here, see Tye 2016. The relevant quality represented by the feeling of pain is a gradable, determinable quality. Take the case of vision. Visual experience doesn't merely represent a stimulus as bright. It represents it as having some specific degree of brightness, such that while looking at two bright objects, one object can look brighter than the other. Similarly, auditory experience represents stimuli as being loud to some specific degree, so that some sounds can be experienced as louder than others; and taste experience can represent food as being sweet to some specific degree, 11 aware of these things, you become aware via introspection that you are having a burning, painful thumb feeling, that is, a burning pain in your thumb and also a throbbing, painful, first finger feeling, that is, a throbbing pain in your first finger. Ninth objection: Pain is a state that creatures are sometimes in. If pain is a feeling, then a creature in pain is a creature in a feeling; and that is nonsensical. Reply: When we describe a creature as being in pain, all we are saying is that the creature has a pain or that the creature feels pain. You can certainly have a feeling and you can certainly feel a feeling. So, there is no difficulty. Final objection: There is no such thing as a pain hallucination, as there are hallucinations for visual experience. If pains are bodily feelings that have representational content, then there should be pain hallucinations (Harman 1990). Consider, for example, the case of feeling a pain in your left leg as a result of a slipped disk in your back pressing upon the sciatic nerve. This is as good a candidate for pain hallucination as any, but even in this case it doesn't appear to you that there is pain there when really there isn’t. You genuinely have pain in your left leg. So, there is no pain hallucination. so there can be two sweet things, one of which tastes sweeter than the other. Correspondingly, an adequate account of the content of pain experience must understand pain as capable of representing a range of specific degrees of badness. This is often wholly ignored in criticisms of representational accounts of pain. See, for example, Block 2006, Pautz 2010. 12  Reply: Pains do not represent pain.6 They represent disturbances in bodily parts. The feeling that results from the slipped disk in your back represents a disturbance in your left leg and there is no disturbance there. So, the case is one of hallucination but not hallucination with respect to pain. This is as it should be, if pain is like visual experience. When Macbeth hallucinated a dagger, he underwent a visual experience that represented a dagger before him, although in reality nothing was there. Macbeth’s experience did not represent visual experience. There was no hallucination with respect to visual experience. The hallucination concerned the dagger. Corresponding points hold for pain. 2. Conclusion Pains are indeed feelings, as Lewis took to be obvious. What is not so obvious is that pains are feelings with (nonconceptual) representational content. Sometimes what is obvious requires the truth of something that is not. Michael Tye The University of Texas at Austin REFERENCES Block, N. 2006 “Bodily Sensations as an Obstacle for Representationalism,” in Pain: New Essays on its Nature and the Methodology of its Study, ed by Murat Aydede, Cambridge, Mass: the MIT Press. 6 In my 2006, I briefly endorsed a view of pain under which pains do represent pain, in one sense of ‘pain’. I now think that this was confused and wrong-headed. 13 Drestske, F. 1995 Naturalizing the Mind, Cambridge, Mass: the MIT Press. Harman, G. 1990) “The Intrinsic Quality of Experience,” Philosophical Perspectives, 4, 31–52. Lewis, D. 1983 Philosophical Papers, Volume 1, Oxford University Press. Nikolajsen, N. and Jensen, T. 2001 “Phantom Limb Pain,” Journal of Anaethesiology, 87, 107-116. Pautz, A. 2010 “A Simple View of Consciousness,” in R. Koons and G. Bealer (ed.), The Waning of Materialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tye, M. 1995 Ten Problems of Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass: the MIT Press. Tye, M. 2006 “In Defense of Representationalism: Reply to Commentaries,” in Pain: New Essays on its Nature and the Methodology of its Study, ed by Murat Aydede, Cambridge, Mass: the MIT Press. Tye, M. 2014 “Transparency, Qualia Realism and Representationalism,” Philosophical Studies, 170, 39-57. Tye, M. 2016 “The Nature of Pain and the Appearance/Reality Distinction,” in The Nature of Phenomenal Qualities, ed by P. Coates, Oxford University Press. 14