Abstract
A lot of qualitatively very different sensations can be pleasant or unpleasant. The Felt-Quality Views that conceive of sensory affect as having an introspectively available common phenomenology or qualitative character face the “heterogeneity problem” of specifying what that qualitative common phenomenology is. In contrast, according to the Attitudinal Views, what is common to all pleasant or unpleasant sensations is that they are all “wanted” or “unwanted” in a certain sort of way. The commonality is explained not on the basis of phenomenology but by a common mental, usually some sort of conative, attitude toward the sensation. Here I criticize both views and offer an alternative framework that combines what is right in both while avoiding their unintuitive commitments. The result is the reductive (psychofunctionalist) adverbial sensory modification view of pleasure and displeasure.
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Notes
In what follows, I will mostly focus on pleasure and positive affect in general for convenience, but the discussion is applicable, mutatis mutandis, to negative affect (unpleasantness, including the painfulness of pains).
Feldman (1997) and Carson (2000). The problem has been noted since ancient times and perhaps its most influential articulation is due to Sidgwick (1907):
Shall we then say that there is a measurable quality of feeling expressed by the word “pleasure,” which is independent of its relation to volition, and strictly indefinable from its simplicity?—like the quality of feeling expressed by “sweet,” of which also we are conscious in varying degrees of intensity. This seems to be the view of some writers: but, for my own part, when I reflect on the notion of pleasure—using the term in the comprehensive sense which I have adopted to include the most refined and subtle intellectual and emotional gratification, no less than the coarser and more refined sensual enjoyments—the only common quality that I can find in the feeling so designated seems to be that relation to desire and volition expressed by the general term “desirable,”... (1907/1981: 127)
Here I will leave discussing the philosophy of mind literature on pain and pleasure to some other time. It is an interesting question why these two groups don’t talk to each other.
Here the list is long. Sidgwick (1907) may have started things going (see the quote above), but things are complicated—he used ‘desirable’ rather than ‘desired.’ See Alston (1968), Davis (1981, 1982), Brandt (1979), Feldman (1997, 2004), Heathwood (2007), among others, for defenses of attitudinal theories. Parfit (2011) and Brady (2013, Pain and the Euthyphro Dilemma, manuscript draft) develop the attitudinal theory in terms of liking (or disliking) a sensation, where this hedonic attitude is taken to be different from desiring in that it’s not responsive to reasons. I will return to this distinction later.
See also, Brink (1989: 221): "the one and only intrinsic good is pleasure, which is understood as a simple, qualitative mental state." A more recent defense is Bramble (2011: 2): “… for an experience to be pleasant (or unpleasant) is just for it to involve or contain a distinctive kind of feeling, one we might call ‘the feeling of pleasure itself’, or simply ‘the pleasant feeling’ (or, in the case of unpleasant experiences, ‘the unpleasant feeling’).”
According to those attitudinal theorists who are also “reason internalists” (or desire-theorists about normative reasons), pleasant sensations are also always intrinsically good: necessarily, they, all by themselves, provide justifying (normative—albeit defeasible) reasons for their subjects—although the matter is complicated by the fact that it is possible to be a reason externalist while advocating a desire theory of sensory pleasure.
As far as I can tell, all attitudinal theorists writing from within the tradition of value theory and moral psychology are conceptual reductionists in that they consider their theories to be supported by constructive conceptual analysis (as in, e.g., the analysis of knowledge, causation, value, etc.) and/or ordinary empirical observation (i.e., empirical evidence available in armchair). See, for instance, Heathwood (2007) for an explicit statement to that effect. However, it’s possible, or even desirable, to promote these theories as proposing an a posteriori metaphysical reduction—see below.
Although, by stipulation, not relevant to the present concern of this paper, we can add another important argument:
(6) Unification. Attitudinal theories can naturally be extended to cover all kinds of pleasure, not just sensory pleasure. Intellectual pleasures (involving aesthetic, moral, prudential, emotional, etc. pleasures), however affectively strong or weak they may be, can be analyzed as cognitive and conative attitudes towards propositions such as desiring, wanting, believing (etc.) that P, where ‘P’ are the relevant propositions. This can be expressed in terms of constructions such as ‘S is pleased that P’ or ‘S is displeased that P’. In short, attitudinal theories have a unified account of sensory and propositional pleasures, whereas felt-quality views cannot be plausibly extended in a similar way to all propositional pleasures. See particularly Feldman (1992, 1997, 2004) and Heathwood (2007) for this line of argument.
As readily acknowledged by Heathwood himself (2007: 38–40).
Parfit (2001: 24–25):
According to [desire-based theorists], instrumental reasons get their force, not from some intrinsic reason, but from some intrinsic desire. And on such theories, as we have seen, we cannot have reasons to have such desires. So all reasons get their force from some desire that, on these theories, we have no reason to have. Our having such desires cannot itself, I am arguing, give us any reasons. If that is true, desire-based theories are built on sand.
For discussions airing similar complaints, see Smith (1994) and Dancy (2000) among others.
For lack of space, I will leave aside the issue of how felt-quality views attempt to handle the problem of reason-giving force of pains and pleasures (see, however, the concluding thoughts below). See Goldstein (1980), Hall (1989), Rachels (2000), and Brady (2013, Pain and the Euthyphro Dilemma, manuscript draft) for useful discussion.
Heathwood takes this direct fashion to be an acquaintance relation: a subject has a de re desire about her sensation only if the subject is acquainted with this sensation. In a naturalistic context, I take this to require at least an ongoing causal relation to the sensation. Note that mere acquaintance with one’s sensation is not sufficient for one to form singular de re thoughts about this sensation.
It is puzzling why Heathwood thinks that his desire-theory is compatible with animals experiencing pleasures and pains: “I see no good reason to deny that the animals we intuitively take to be capable of experiencing pleasure and pain are also the ones that have desires. We have no hesitation in attributing painful sensations to, say, rats, but we likewise have no hesitation in explaining why, say, this rat ran to the trap by appealing to his desire for the cheese” (2007: 32, fn. 17). But the rat’s desire for the cheese is one thing, and his desire for his own taste sensation of the cheese is another. Is it really true that we have no hesitation to attribute introspective desires to rats about their own sensations?
For proposals of this sort, see Armstrong (1962), Pitcher (1970), Tye (1995), Hall (1989), Kahane (2009), Parfit (2011), Brady (2013, Pain and the Euthyphro Dilemma, manuscript draft), among others. Only the latter two are explicit about their choice of ‘like/dislike’ over ‘desire’ as they think there are crucial differences between them about their reason responsiveness.
See Sobel (2011) for arguments for thinking that likings are a species of desires.
Brandt (1979: 38) gives this as a definition of sensory pleasure.
Actually, a psychofunctional role notion—see below. See Block (1980) for the distinction between functionalism and psychofunctionalism.
See Aydede (2000), where p-desiring was called ‘desiring*’. For a similar treatment of pain affect, see Clark (2005). The framework to be presented below was, in outline form, part of a paper co-written with Matt Fulkerson that was presented in the Pacific APA meeting in San Francisco, 2013. We hope to continue collaborating on this topic.
Terminology is borrowed from Helm (2002)—although I am not at all confident that Helm would agree with me about the way in which I put that expression in use here.
I, of course, as a member of species with relevant mental capacities. So I agree with Goldstein (1980) that the intrinsic goodness of pleasures and the intrinsic badness of (painful) pains are graspable as such, and that is the way they rationalize and justify our actions and thinking.
See Aydede & Fulkerson (2013) for extensive elaboration of this point in the context of representationalism about affect.
I would like to thank David Bain, Michael Brady, Linda Davies, and Matthew Fulkerson for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful to David Bain and Michael Brady for their kind invitation to participate in the conferences they organized for the Pain Project in Glasgow in June of 2012 and 2013 where parts of this paper were presented, and for their generous hospitality, as well as for providing me with the opportunity to contribute to the special issue of this Journal they are editing. Thanks also to my students in my seminar on affect for very stimulating feedback on parts of this paper.
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Aydede, M. How to Unify Theories of Sensory Pleasure: An Adverbialist Proposal. Rev.Phil.Psych. 5, 119–133 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0175-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0175-6