A Quasi-Perceptualist Account of Pain Experience

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 6 proposes a representationalist theory of pain experience. It begins by pointing out that pain normally has several prominent components, including a bodily disturbance, a high-level representation of that disturbance, which has much in common with perceptual representations, and an affective response to the disturbance. Although these elements are normally tightly bound together, recent clinical and experimental studies show that they are dissociable. The most striking finding in this area is that the sensation of pain becomes unstuck from hurting in the disorder known as pain asymbolia. The chapter proposes a theory of sensory pain that analyzes its phenomenology in terms of the higher-level, quasi-perceptual representations of bodily disturbances, thereby assimilating the phenomenology to the other forms of phenomenology studied in Chapter 5. It also explains hurting in terms of an attitude toward the bodily disturbances that constitute sensory pain—specifically, the attitude of dislike.