Abstract
Representationalist theories of phenomenal consciousness have problems in accounting for pain, for at least two reasons. First of all, the negative affective phenomenology of pain (its painfulness) does not seem to be representational at all. Secondly, pain experiences are not transparent to introspection in the way perceptions are. This is reflected, e.g. in the fact that we do not acknowledge pain hallucinations. In this paper, I defend that representationalism has the potential to overcome these objections. Defenders of representationalism have tried to analyse every kind of phenomenal character in terms of indicative contents. But there is another possibility: Affective phenomenology, in fact, depends on imperative representational content. This provides a satisfactory solution to the aforementioned difficulties.
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Notes
The main divide in this respect lies between higher-order theories (be it higher-order thought theories such as Rosenthal’s (op. cit.) or higher-order perception theories such as the one defended in Lycan (1995)) for which what makes a mental state phenomenally conscious is that another state is properly related to it and first-order theories (such as Tye’s or Dretske’s, op. cit.) which propose other constraints on contentful states. For a summary of higher-order theories, see Carruthers (2009). Tye (2009b) is an overview of first-order representationalism.
This is not to say that our self-knowledge regarding our pains is infallible, of course. For example, we may very well mistake the touch of an unremoved laundry tag for the painful bite of a stinging insect on our neck. It is also well-known that expectations and other psychological factors may increase or decrease, even to the point of elimination, the feeling of pain (cf. Koyama et al. 2005). The point is simply that, when we do feel pain, we are unmoved by news according to which the bodily disturbance which supposedly is in the content of our pain experience really does not exist.
What about this other explanation:
Pain experiences track bodily damage with high reliability; this may explain the existence of a practice of applying the concept of pain whenever the experience is present -even in the absence of bodily damage. This practice, given the high reliability of pain, is sufficiently safe, so its emergence is all too natural; but this is compatible with pain being about bodily damages and, therefore, with there being experiences of pain without the thing experienced. That is, this is compatible with there being pain hallucinations, even if we never judge that we are suffering them.
This would be, in effect, an error theory about pain hallucinations: Whenever we suffer one of these, we judge, wrongly, that we do not. Regardless of the plausibility of this kind of error theories—it would be understandable for a sufferer of chronic phantom limb pain to feel outraged at the suggestion that she is not really in pain at all—this suggestion faces the following problem: Visual experiences are as reliable as pain experiences, if not more, in tracking the facts that their content is about. If so, the suggestion above can be applied equally well to seeing: It would have been equally natural to end up in a situation in which visual hallucinations are not recognised. It remains to be explained, then, why we do recognise them. Reliability cannot explain the asymmetry between seeing and being in pain because both kinds of experiences are equally reliable.
I should point out that the account to be presented in this paper answers Aydede’s complaint. So, if I am wrong and Aydede has identified here a substantial difficulty with Tye’s account, this would count as an additional reason to embrace my solution. For a sketch of a causal–informational account of imperative content that may help assuage naturalistic worries such as Aydede’s, see “A naturalistic account of imperative content” section.
And if, e.g. your preferred brand of representationalism is a Rosenthal-style HOT theory, then you should say that the phenomenal character of the painfulness of pain is constituted by the right kind of imperative representation being targeted by the right kind of higher-order thought. And so, mutatis mutandis, with other representationalist theories.
Remember this is non-conceptual content. For example, no capacity of entertaining de se thoughts is necessary for the having of a representation with this imperative content.
Russell’s so-called multiple-relation theory of judgement gets more complicated in later writings. See Pincock (2008) for an informative discussion.
She has also called them goal icons (and indicative icons fact icons) in her manuscript Some Different Ways to Think. Millikan has never discussed the phenomenal character of experiences, although she does maintain that pains are what she calls pushmi-pullyu representations (extremely simple representations that have both indicative and imperative contents, cf. Millikan 1995).
The proposal defended in this paper would not exist had it not been for Millikan’s material on imperative content.
I would like to note that OC-CAC-Imperative provides a straightforward solution to the problem of mental causation. Some mental states (which are identical to physical states with certain causal–historical properties) have the (imperative) content they have precisely in virtue of what they tend to cause.
In fact, I think, a correct set of sufficient conditions for the presence of (imperative or indicative) content has to solve the indeterminacy problem—it has to warrant a univocal content attribution, see, e.g. Fodor (1990), Enç (2002), Ryder (2006) and this calls for heavy refinement in OC-CAC-Imperative. Millikan’s account is also subject to a similar objection. I am confident that these issues can be solved, although a presentation of my reasons for this confidence would take us too far afield.
Although I have been simplifying his view, in fact Tye (2006a) defends that pain represents the complex object: [tissue damage only insofar as it is represented by a pain experience]. Tye postulates this slightly awkward intentional object in an attempt to avoid the charge that PANIC must accept that pain (the object, not the experience) can happen without a pain experience, which, admittedly, would be an implausible consequence.
A better answer to this objection is, simply, to point out that painful experiences have no indicative intentional objects. That is, painful q is an empty concept.
Seager may be alternatively interpreted as saying that “pure negative value” provides the common phenomenological core that every painful experience and no other shares. Indeed, it seems as if painful experiences share a common phenomenology, but the suggestion that it may be cashed out in terms of pure negative value does not work, for the reasons advanced in the main text.
In any event, I am willing to concede that it does seem as if pains have a common phenomenological core. There is, I think, a way in which this can be accommodated by the imperative content account. An experience is painful if and only if it has a PANIIC which is a substitution of the following schema:
- Common Core::
-
Stop thatx bodily disturbance!
where that x bodily disturbance is a variable that stands for any kind of bodily disturbance, such as, say, the left middle finger’s being bruised or the stomach’s being ulcerated. Common Core provides the common element in all painful experiences.
Groups of pains that seem to share a common phenomenological character (say, thermal, mechanical or chemical pains) will have contents that are substitutions of a schema just like Common Core, except for the domain of the variable, which will be more restricted. For example,
- Common Core—Thermal::
-
Stop thaty bodily disturbance!
where that y bodily disturbance stands for a bodily disturbance caused by an abrupt change in temperature.
An important problem for this approach is that we may fear bodily disturbances. For example, I may be afraid of a (painful) cancer. If we are not careful, some fear contents may end up coinciding with pain contents, which would be disastrous, at least because no fear is a pain and no pain is a fear.
Let me say something about how to distinguish fear contents which involve bodily disturbances from pain contents—although it will be no more than educated speculation. It looks as if a crucial difference between pains and fears is that the former are directed at stopping or reverting an occurrent bodily disturbance, while the latter is directed at the future consequences of the bodily disturbance in question. So, the feelings associated with a fear of a cancer I have involve the future development of the cancer which may eventuate, say, in my death or further pains. Maybe, then, the PANIIC of the feelings associated with fear of my cancer is something along the lines of
- Cancer—Fear::
-
May my cancer not cause further disturbances!
If the cancer is painful, on the other hand, the PANIIC of such painfulness will be something like
- Cancer—Pain::
-
Stop my cancer!
This fear PANIIC does not seem entirely implausible. For example, when I cut my finger I feel pain—I token a state which compels the cut to be no more—but I am not afraid of it—I do not token a state which compels it not to cause further disturbances, maybe because I have a standing belief that such cuts do not cause them. In any event, let me stress that these points are advanced tentatively and speculatively and are not part of the core proposal defended in the paper.
Actually, a teleosemantic theory of content such as Millikan’s would allow the content of orgasm to be “Have more fecundation!”, even if the orgasms that lead to actual fecundation are, statistically, a minority. It is enough if the conditions under which orgasms where selected—those conditions under which orgasms helped their consumer fulfil its function—where those in which it caused more fecundation (through more sexual activity).
The complementary cases, although we are less familiar with them, also exist: being physically disgusted with our feeling (what we take to be) a lowly pleasure, for instance.
Modulo the impact of expectations and the like on our feelings of pain. See Footnote 3.
I take Peacocke to be gesturing towards a view about rational transitions in general along this lines in several passages of Peacocke (2008; for example, p. 197, on judgements about the pain of others on the basis of their behaviour).
A final, minor point is that the desires that may help fix the imperative content of a pain (desires for a tissue damage to cease) are not the desires commonly appealed to by cognitivists (desires for an experience to cease).
I am utterly unable to do this myself, but I believe the disassociation reports.
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Acknowledgements
Financial support for this work was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research project FFI2009-11347 and Consolider-Ingenio project CSD2009-00056. I would like to thank Manuel García-Carpintero, Blanca Gómez, David Pineda, Michael Tye, two anonymous reviewers, and audiences in Berlin and Buenos Aires for their comments and feedback on earlier drafts.
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Martínez, M. Imperative content and the painfulness of pain. Phenom Cogn Sci 10, 67–90 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9172-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9172-0