Bodily pain strikes many philosophers as deeply paradoxical. The issue is that pains seem to bear both physical characteristics, such as a location in the body, and mental characteristics, such being mind-dependent. In this paper I clarify and address this alleged paradox of pain. I begin by showing how a further assumption, Objectivism, the thesis that what one feels in one’s body when one is in pain is something mind-independent, is necessary for the generation of the paradox. Consequently, the paradox (...) can be avoided if one rejects this idea. However, doing so raises its own difficulties, for it is not obvious how anything can possess all of the features we typically associate with bodily pain. To address this puzzle and finally put the paradox of pain to rest, I develop the Embodied View, a novel metaphysical account on which pains are constitutively mind-dependent features of parts of a subject’s body. (shrink)

The paradox of pain is that pain is in some ways like a bodily state and in other ways like a mental state. You can have a pain in your shin, but there is no denying that you are in pain if it feels like you are. How can a state be both in your shin and in your mind? Evaluativism is a promising answer. According to evaluativism, an experience of pain in your shin represents that there is a disturbance (...) in your shin, and that it is bad that this disturbance is there. Thus, the experience brings you to tend to your shin by telling you something about the state of your shin. But the paradox of pain still confronts evaluativism in the form of the killing the messenger objection: The evaluativist has a nice story about our body‐directed responses to pain, like tending to wounds, but this story does not explain responses to pain, like taking painkillers, that seem to be experience‐directed. Evaluativists have offered accounts of experience‐directed responses to pain, but I will argue that these accounts conflict with the Transparency thesis—the claim that we can only access our experiences inferentially. Evaluativism and Transparency are natural bedfellows, so this is a problem for evaluativists. Having argued as much, I will go on to develop a new evaluativist account of taking painkillers, which does not conflict with Transparency. I call it naïve evaluativism. According to naïve evaluativism, we experience painkillers as making tissue damage or disruption less bad, and absent further reflection, that is, why we take them. (shrink)

In my thesis, I challenge existing philosophical and scientific accounts of pain to explain certain constitutional, functional and empirical problems. Though difficult, some of these problems will be familiar. Unlike perceptual experiences, pains are strikingly affective and when we are in pain we are primarily concerned with the experience itself rather than mind-independent objects. The obvious explanation, that pain is not a perceptual experience, would be appealing if it were not for the fact that pains vary in quality, intensity and (...) location. These seem to be features of paradigmatic perceptual experiences. The magnitude of another problem, the weakness of the correlation between pain and the stimulus, has been under-played. It is widely observed that those with chronic conditions experience pain in the absence of the stimulus and in circumstances like sport and war severe injuries occur in the absence of pain. I argue that the variable relationship between pain and the stimulus is normal; it is not confined to abnormal cases or circumstances. As no existing account proves explanatorily adequate, I develop a novel position called ‘near-motivationalism’ from a revisionary approach to the conceptual models of pain science. This has the power to solve the problems I set. (shrink)