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  1. What makes pains unpleasant?David Bain - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (1):69-89.
    The unpleasantness of pain motivates action. Hence many philosophers have doubted that it can be accounted for purely in terms of pain’s possession of indicative representational content. Instead, they have explained it in terms of subjects’ inclinations to stop their pains, or in terms of pain’s imperative content. I claim that such “noncognitivist” accounts fail to accommodate unpleasant pain’s reason-giving force. What is needed, I argue, is a view on which pains are unpleasant, motivate, and provide reasons in virtue of (...)
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  • Strangers to ourselves: a Nietzschean challenge to the badness of suffering.Nicolas Delon - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9):3600-3629.
    Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that a (...)
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  • More of me! Less of me!: Reflexive Imperativism about Affective Phenomenal Character.Luca Barlassina & Max Khan Hayward - 2019 - Mind 128 (512):1013-1044.
    Experiences like pains, pleasures, and emotions have affective phenomenal character: they feel pleasant or unpleasant. Imperativism proposes to explain affective phenomenal character by appeal to imperative content, a kind of intentional content that directs rather than describes. We argue that imperativism is on the right track, but has been developed in the wrong way. There are two varieties of imperativism on the market: first-order and higher-order. We show that neither is successful, and offer in their place a new theory: reflexive (...)
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  • Why Take Painkillers?David Bain - 2019 - Noûs 53 (2):462-490.
    Accounts of the nature of unpleasant pain have proliferated over the past decade, but there has been little systematic investigation of which of them can accommodate its badness. This paper is such a study. In its sights are two targets: those who deny the non-instrumental disvalue of pain's unpleasantness; and those who allow it but deny that it can be accommodated by the view—advanced by me and others—that unpleasant pains are interoceptive experiences with evaluative content. Against the former, I argue (...)
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  • The Pleasure of Art.Mohan Matthen - 2017 - Australasian Philosophical Review 1 (1):6-28.
    This paper presents a new account of aesthetic pleasure, according to which it is a distinct psychological structure marked by a characteristic self-reinforcing motivation. Pleasure figures in the appreciation of an object in two ways: In the short run, when we are in contact with particular artefacts on particular occasions, aesthetic pleasure motivates engagement and keeps it running smoothly—it may do this despite the fact that the object we engagement is aversive in some ways. Over longer periods, it plays a (...)
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  • Pain.Murat Aydede - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Pain is the most prominent member of a class of sensations known as bodily sensations, which includes itches, tickles, tingles, orgasms, and so on. Bodily sensations are typically attributed to bodily locations and appear to have features such as volume, intensity, duration, and so on, that are ordinarily attributed to physical objects or quantities. Yet these sensations are often thought to be logically private, subjective, self-intimating, and the source of incorrigible knowledge for those who have them. Hence there appear to (...)
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  • Valence and Value.Peter Carruthers - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (3):658-680.
    Valence is a central component of all affective states, including pains, pleasures, emotions, moods, and feelings of desire or repulsion.This paper has two main goals. One is to suggest that enough is now known about the causes, consequences, and properties of valence to indicate that it forms a unitary natural-psychological kind, one that seemingly plays a fundamental role in motivating all kinds of intentional action. If this turns out to be true, then the correct characterization of the nature of valence (...)
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  • Fish and microchips: on fish pain and multiple realization.Matthias Michel - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 176 (9):2411-2428.
    Opponents to consciousness in fish argue that fish do not feel pain because they do not have a neocortex, which is a necessary condition for feeling pain. A common counter-argument appeals to the multiple realizability of pain: while a neocortex might be necessary for feeling pain in humans, pain might be realized differently in fish. This paper argues, first, that it is impossible to find a criterion allowing us to demarcate between plausible and implausible cases of multiple realization of pain (...)
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  • Tracking Representationalism.David Bourget & Angela Mendelovici - 2014 - In Andrew Bailey (ed.), Philosophy of mind: the key thinkers. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 209-235.
    This paper overviews the current status of debates on tracking representationalism, the view that phenomenal consciousness is a matter of tracking features of one's environment in a certain way. We overview the main arguments for the view and the main objections and challenges it faces. We close with a discussion of alternative versions of representationalism that might overcome the shortcomings of tracking representationalism.
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  • Pains that Don't Hurt.David Bain - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (2):305-320.
    Pain asymbolia is a rare condition caused by brain damage, usually in adulthood. Asymbolics feel pain but appear indifferent to it, and indifferent also to visual and verbal threats. How should we make sense of this? Nikola Grahek thinks asymbolics’ pains are abnormal, lacking a component that make normal pains unpleasant and motivating. Colin Klein thinks that what is abnormal is not asymbolics’ pains, but asymbolics: they have a psychological deficit making them unresponsive to unpleasant pain. I argue that an (...)
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  • Is the experience of pain transparent? Introspecting Phenomenal Qualities.Murat Aydede - 2019 - Synthese 196 (2):677-708.
    I distinguish between two claims of transparency of experiences. One claim is weaker and supported by phenomenological evidence. This I call the transparency datum. Introspection of standard perceptual experiences as well as bodily sensations is consistent with, indeed supported by, the transparency datum. I formulate a stronger transparency thesis that is entailed by representationalism about experiential phenomenology. I point out some empirical consequences of strong transparency in the context of representationalism. I argue that pain experiences, as well as some other (...)
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  • Reasons and Theories of Sensory Affect.Murat Aydede & Matthew Fulkerson - 2018 - In David Bain & Michael Brady (eds.), Philosophy of Pain: Unpleasantness, Emotion, and Deviance. New York: Routledge. pp. 27-59.
    Some sensory experiences are pleasant, some unpleasant. This is a truism. But understanding what makes these experiences pleasant and unpleasant is not an easy job. Various difficulties and puzzles arise as soon as we start theorizing. There are various philosophical theories on offer that seem to give different accounts for the positive or negative affective valences of sensory experiences. In this paper, we will look at the current state of art in the philosophy of mind, present the main contenders, critically (...)
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  • On the Very Idea of Valenced Perception.Hilla Jacobson - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    Tradition contrasts “cold,” motivationally-inert, “standard” perception with “hot,” motivationally-potent, emotion and affect. Against this backdrop, it has recently been argued that perceptual experiences have another fundamental phenomenal aspect, beyond their sensory aspects–perception in all sense-modalities is (at least often) Intrinsically valenced. Roughly, its phenomenal character is inherently pleasant or unpleasant, feeling good or bad to some degree. Yet, the revolutionary notion of Intrinsically Valenced Perception (IVP) requires elucidation and is fraught with theoretical difficulties. The paper aims to explicate and address (...)
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  • A Contemporary Account of Sensory Pleasure.Murat Aydede - 2018 - In Lisa Shapiro (ed.), Pleasure: A History. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Usa. pp. 239-266.
    [This is the penultimate version, please send me an email for the final version]. Some sensations are pleasant, some unpleasant, and some are neither. Furthermore, those that are pleasant or unpleasant are so to different degrees. In this essay, I want to explore what kind of a difference is the difference between these three kinds of sensations. I will develop a comprehensive three-level account of sensory pleasure that is simultaneously adverbialist, functionalist and is also a version of a satisfied experiential-desire (...)
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  • Pains as reasons.Manolo Martínez - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (9):2261-2274.
    Imperativism is the view that the phenomenal character of the affective component of pains, orgasms, and pleasant or unpleasant sensory experience depends on their imperative intentional content. In this paper I canvass an imperativist treatment of pains as reason-conferring states.
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  • The Function of Pain.Laurenz C. Casser - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (2):364-378.
    Various prominent theories of pain assume that it is pain’s biological function to inform organisms about damage to their bodies. I argue that this is a mistake. First, there is no biological evidence to support the notion that pain was originally selected for its informative capacities, nor that it currently contributes to the fitness of organisms in this specific capacity. Second, neurological evidence indicates that modulating mechanisms in the nociceptive system systematically prevent pain from serving a primarily informative role. These (...)
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  • Affect: Representationalists' Headache.Murat Aydede & Matthew Fulkerson - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 170 (2):175-198.
    Representationalism is the view that the phenomenal character of experiences is identical to their representational content of a certain sort. This view requires a strong transparency condition on phenomenally conscious experiences. We argue that affective qualities such as experienced pleasantness or unpleasantness are counter-examples to the transparency thesis and thus to the sort of representationalism that implies it.
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  • (1 other version)Recent Work on Pain.Jennifer Corns - 2018 - Analysis 78 (4):737-753.
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  • Evaluativist Accounts of Pain's Unpleasantness.David Bain - 2017 - In Jennifer Corns (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain. New York: Routledge. pp. 40-50.
    Evaluativism is best thought of as a way of enriching a perceptual view of pain to account for pain’s unpleasantness or painfulness. Once it was common for philosophers to contrast pains with perceptual experiences (McGinn 1982; Rorty 1980). It was thought that perceptual experiences were intentional (or content-bearing, or about something), whereas pains were representationally blank. But today many of us reject this contrast. For us, your having a pain in your toe is a matter not of your sensing “pain-ly” (...)
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  • Transparency and the Mindfulness Opacity Hypothesis.Victor Lange & Thor Grünbaum - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (3):822-843.
    Many philosophers endorse the Transparency Thesis, the claim that by introspection one cannot become aware of one's experience. Recently, some authors have suggested that the Transparency Thesis is challenged by introspective states reached under mindfulness. We label this the Mindfulness Opacity Hypothesis. The present paper develops the hypothesis in important new ways. First, we motivate the hypothesis by drawing on recent clinical psychology and cognitive science of mindfulness. Secondly, we develop the hypothesis by describing the implied shift in experiential perspective, (...)
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  • Bad by Nature, An Axiological Theory of Pain.Olivier Massin - 2017 - In Jennifer Corns (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain. New York: Routledge. pp. 321-333.
    This chapter defends an axiological theory of pain according to which pains are bodily episodes that are bad in some way. Section 1 introduces two standard assumptions about pain that the axiological theory constitutively rejects: (i) that pains are essentially tied to consciousness and (ii) that pains are not essentially tied to badness. Section 2 presents the axiological theory by contrast to these and provides a preliminary defense of it. Section 3 introduces the paradox of pain and argues that since (...)
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  • Pain and spatial inclusion: evidence from Mandarin.Michelle Liu & Colin Klein - 2020 - Analysis 80 (2):262-272.
    The surface grammar of reports such as ‘I have a pain in my leg’ suggests that pains are objects which are spatially located in parts of the body. We show that the parallel construction is not available in Mandarin. Further, four philosophically important grammatical features of such reports cannot be reproduced. This suggests that arguments and puzzles surrounding such reports may be tracking artefacts of English, rather than philosophically significant features of the world.
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  • The inadequacy of unitary characterizations of pain.Jennifer Corns - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 169 (3):355-378.
    Though pain scientists now understand pain to be a complex experience typically composed of sensation, emotion, cognition, and motivational responses, many philosophers maintain that pain is adequately characterized by one privileged aspect of this complexity. Philosophically dominant unitary accounts of pain as a sensation or perception are here evaluated by their ability to explain actual cases—and found wanting. Further, it is argued that no forthcoming unitary characterization of pain is likely to succeed. Instead, I contend that both the motivating intuitions (...)
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  • Pains and reasons: Why it is rational to kill the Messenger.Brian Cutter & Michael Tye - 2014 - Philosophical Quarterly 64 (256):423-433.
    In this paper, we defend the representationalist theory of phenomenal consciousness against a recent objection due to Hilla Jacobson, who charges representationalism with a failure to explain the role of pain in rationalizing certain forms of behavior. In rough outline, her objection is that the representationalist is unable to account for the rationality of certain acts, such as the act of taking pain killers, which are aimed at getting rid of the experience of pain rather than its intentional object. If (...)
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  • Not Only a Messenger: Towards an Attitudinal‐Representational Theory of Pain.Hilla Jacobson - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (2):382-408.
    The main goal of this paper is to present a theory of the most salient aspect of the phenomenal character of pain – namely, the painfulness of pain or its negative affective quality. This task involves developing an account of the evaluative structure of pain, according to which painfulness is constituted by a frustrated conative attitude that is directed towards the bodily condition the obtaining of which the pain represents. The argument for the proposed Attitudinal-Representational Theory of Pain proceeds by (...)
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  • A perceptual theory of moods.Mauro Rossi - 2019 - Synthese 198 (8):7119-7147.
    The goal of this paper is to offer a new theory of moods, according to which moods are perceptual experiences that represent undetermined objects as possessing specific evaluative properties. I start by listing a series of features that moods are typically taken to possess and claim that a satisfactory theory of moods must be able either to explain why moods genuinely possess these features or to explain these appearances away in a non-ad hoc way. I show that my account provides (...)
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  • Relational Imperativism about Affective Valence.Antti Kauppinen - 2021 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind 1:341-371.
    Affective experiences motivate and rationalize behavior in virtue of feeling good or bad, or their valence. It has become popular to explain such phenomenal character with intentional content. Rejecting evaluativism and extending earlier imperativist accounts of pain, I argue that when experiences feel bad, they both represent things as being in a certain way and tell us to see to it that they will no longer be that way. Such commands have subjective authority by virtue of linking up with a (...)
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  • Attentional Structuring, Subjectivity, and the Ubiquity of Reflexive Inner Awareness.Amit Chaturvedi - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (9):3240-3279.
    Some have argued that a subject has an inner awareness of its conscious mental states by virtue of the non-introspective, reflexive awareness that any conscious state has of itself. But, what exactly is it like to have a ubiquitous and reflexive inner awareness of one’s conscious states, as distinct from one’s outer awareness of the apparent world? This essay derives a model of ubiquitous inner awareness (UIA) from Sebastian Watzl’s recent theory of attention as the activity of structuring consciousness into (...)
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  • Imperativism and Pain Intensity.Colin Klein & Manolo Martínez - 2018 - In David Bain & Michael Brady (eds.), Philosophy of Pain: Unpleasantness, Emotion, and Deviance. New York: Routledge. pp. 13-26.
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  • The World According to Suffering.Antti Kauppinen - 2019 - In Michael S. Brady, David Bain & Jennifer Corns (eds.), Philosophy of Suffering: Metaphysics, Value, and Normativity. London: Routledge.
    On the face of it, suffering from the loss of a loved one and suffering from intense pain are very different things. What makes them both experiences of suffering? I argue it’s neither their unpleasantness nor the fact that we desire not to have such experiences. Rather, what we suffer from negatively transforms the way our situation as a whole appears to us. To cash this out, I introduce the notion of negative affective construal, which involves practically perceiving our situation (...)
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  • Mental Strength: A Theory of Experience Intensity.Jorge Morales - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):1-21.
    Our pains can be more or less intense, our mental imagery can be more or less vivid, our perceptual experiences can be more or less striking. These degrees of intensity of conscious experiences are all manifestations of a phenomenal property I call mental strength. In this article, I argue that mental strength is a domain-general phenomenal magnitude; in other words, it is a phenomenal quantity shared by all conscious experiences that explains their degree of felt intensity. Mental strength has been (...)
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  • The Pain System is Not a Bodily Disturbance Detector.Tiina Carita Rosenqvist - 2024 - In Ana Cuevas-Badallo, Mariano Martín-Villuendas & Juan Gefaell (eds.), Life and Mind: Theoretical and Applied Issues in Contemporary Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Sciences. Springer. pp. 91-122.
    What is the function of pain? A popular view in contemporary philosophy is that the pain system is a bodily disturbance detector: pain states track/detect and represent bodily disturbances and the phenomenal character of the (sensory dimension of) pain supervenes on this representational content. The view can accommodate paradigmatic pain cases, e.g., when pain follows from stepping on a nail. Once we consider more complex pain phenomena, however, it has seemingly little to offer. In this paper, I discuss dissociation between (...)
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  • Strong Representationalism and Bodily Sensations: Reliable Causal Covariance and Biological Function.Coninx Sabrina - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (2):210-232.
    Bodily sensations, such as pain, hunger, itches, or sexual feelings, are commonly characterized in terms of their phenomenal character. In order to account for this phenomenal character, many philosophers adopt strong representationalism. According to this view, bodily sensations are essentially and entirely determined by an intentional content related to particular conditions of the body. For example, pain would be nothing more than the representation of actual or potential tissue damage. In order to motivate and justify their view, strong representationalists often (...)
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  • Emotional Perception.Matthew Fulkerson - 2020 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (1):16-30.
    Some perceptual experiences seem to have an emotional element that makes both an affective and motivational difference in the content and character of the experience. I offer a novel account of the...
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  • An Honest Look at Hybrid Theories of Pleasure.Daniel Pallies - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (3):887-907.
    What makes it the case that a given experience is pleasurable? According to the felt-quality theory, each pleasurable experience is pleasurable because of the way that it feels—its “qualitative character” or “felt-quality”. According to the attitudinal theory, each pleasurable experience is pleasurable because the experiencer takes certain attitudes towards it. These two theories of pleasure are typically framed as rivals, but it could be that they are both partly right. It could be that pleasure is partly a matter of felt-quality, (...)
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  • The Contents and Causes of Curiosity.Peter Carruthers - 2024 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 75 (4):871-895.
    There has been a flurry of recent work on the cognitive neuroscience of curiosity. But everyone in the field offers definitions of curiosity that are meta-cognitive in nature. Curiosity is said to be a desire for knowledge, or a motivation to learn about something, and so on. This appears problematic. It either makes it difficult to see how curiosity can properly be attributed to cats and rats (let alone birds and bees), or it commits us to attributing capacities for self-awareness (...)
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  • Spatial content of painful sensations.Błażej Skrzypulec - 2021 - Mind and Language 36 (4):554-569.
    Philosophical considerations regarding experiential spatial content have focused on exteroceptive sensations presenting external entities, and not on interoceptive experiences that present states of our own body. A notable example is studies on interoceptive touch, in which it is argued that interoceptive tactile experiences have rich spatial content such that tactile sensations are experienced as located in a spatial field. This paper investigates whether a similarly rich spatial content can be attributed to experiences of acute, cutaneous pain. It is argued that (...)
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  • (1 other version)Affective Representation and Affective Attitudes.Jonathan Mitchell - 2019 - Synthese (4):1-28.
    Many philosophers have understood the representational dimension of affective states along the model of sense-perceptual experiences, even claiming the relevant affective experiences are perceptual experiences. This paper argues affective experiences involve a kind of personal level affective representation disanalogous from the representational character of perceptual experiences. The positive thesis is that affective representation is a non-transparent, non-sensory form of evaluative representation, whereby a felt valenced attitude represents the object of the experience as minimally good or bad, and one experiences that (...)
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  • Pain: Modularity and Cognitive Constitution.Błażej Skrzypulec - forthcoming - The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Discussions concerning the modularity of the pain system have been focused on questions regarding the cognitive penetrability of pain mechanisms. It has been claimed that phenomena such as placebo analgesia demonstrate that the pain system is cognitively penetrated; therefore, it is not encapsulated from central cognition. However, important arguments have been formulated which aim to show that cognitive penetrability does not in fact entail a lack of modularity of the pain system. This paper offers an alternative way to reject the (...)
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  • Explicit nonconceptual metacognition.Peter Carruthers - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (7):2337-2356.
    The goal of this paper is to explore forms of metacognition that have rarely been discussed in the extensive psychological and philosophical literatures on the topic. These would comprise explicit instances of meta-representation of some set of mental states or processes in oneself, but without those representations being embedded in anything remotely resembling a theory of mind, and independent of deployment of any sort of concept-like representation of the mental. Following a critique of some extant suggestions made by Nicholas Shea, (...)
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  • Pain and Mental Imagery.Bence Nanay - 2017 - The Monist 100 (4):485-500.
    One of the most promising trends both in the neuroscience of pain and in psychiatric treatments of chronic pain is the focus on mental imagery. My aim is to argue that if we take these findings seriously, we can draw very important and radical philosophical conclusions. I argue that what we pretheoretically take to be pain is partly constituted by sensory stimulation-driven pain processing and partly constituted by mental imagery. This general picture can explain some problematic cases of pain perception, (...)
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  • No Pain, No Gain (in Darwinian Fitness): A Representational Account of Affective Experience.Benjamin Kozuch - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (3):693-714.
    Reductive representationalist theories of consciousness are yet to produce a satisfying account of pain’s affective component, the part that makes it painful. The paramount problem here is that that there seems to be no suitable candidate for what affective experience represents. This article suggests that affective experience represents the Darwinian fitness effects of events. I argue that, because of affective experience’s close association with motivation, natural selection will work to bring affect into covariance with the average fitness effects of types (...)
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  • Shannon + Friston = Content: Intentionality in predictive signaling systems.Carrie Figdor - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2793-2816.
    What is the content of a mental state? This question poses the problem of intentionality: to explain how mental states can be about other things, where being about them is understood as representing them. A framework that integrates predictive coding and signaling systems theories of cognitive processing offers a new perspective on intentionality. On this view, at least some mental states are evaluations, which differ in function, operation, and normativity from representations. A complete naturalistic theory of intentionality must account for (...)
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  • A defense of holistic representationalism.Jacob Berger - 2018 - Mind and Language 33 (2):161-176.
    Representationalism holds that a perceptual experience's qualitative character is identical with certain of its representational properties. To date, most representationalists endorse atomistic theories of perceptual content, according to which an experience's content, and thus character, does not depend on its relations to other experiences. David Rosenthal, by contrast, proposes a view that is naturally construed as a version of representationalism on which experiences’ relations to one another determine their contents and characters. I offer here a new defense of this holistic (...)
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  • Pain, Pleasure, and Unpleasure.David Bain & Michael Brady - 2014 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (1):1-14.
    Compare your pain when immersing your hand in freezing water and your pleasure when you taste your favourite wine. The relationship seems obvious. Your pain experience is unpleasant, aversive, negative, and bad. Your experience of the wine is pleasant, attractive, positive, and good. Pain and pleasure are straightforwardly opposites. Or that, at any rate, can seem beyond doubt, and to leave little more to be said. But, in fact, it is not beyond doubt. And, true or false, it leaves a (...)
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  • Internal constraints for phenomenal externalists: a structure matching theory.Bryce Dalbey & Bradford Saad - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-29.
    We motivate five constraints on theorizing about sensory experience. We then propose a novel form of naturalistic intentionalism that succeeds where other theories fail by satisfying all of these constraints. On the proposed theory, which we call structure matching tracking intentionalism, brains states track determinables. Internal structural features of those states select determinates of those determinables for presentation in experience. We argue that this theory is distinctively well-positioned to both explain internal-phenomenal structural correlations and accord external features a role in (...)
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  • On The Content and Character of Pain Experience.Richard Gray - 2019 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (1):47-68.
    Tracking representationalism explains the negative affective character of pain, and its capacity to motivate action, by reference to the representation of the badness for us of bodily damage. I argue that there is a more fitting instantiation of the tracking relation – the badness for us of extremely intense stimuli – and use this to motivate a non-reductive approach to the negative affective character of pain. The view of pain proposed here is supported by consideration of three related topics: the (...)
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  • Tracking representationalism and olfaction.Błażej Skrzypulec - 2022 - Mind and Language 38 (2):446-463.
    While philosophers of perception develop representational theories of olfactory experiences, there are doubts regarding whether features of olfactory perception can be accommodated within the representationalist framework. In particular, it is argued that the function of olfaction is not to represent stimuli but rather to evaluate it. The paper claims that the major representational accounts of olfaction have problems in accommodating the evaluative aspects of olfactory phenomenology. However, an alternative position, named “olfactory evaluativism,” is proposed which is free of these problems (...)
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  • Representational Solution to the Messenger-Shooting Objection.Błażej Skrzypulec - forthcoming - Acta Analytica.
    Representational accounts of painful experiences, which characterize contents of pain in indicative terms, face a serious problem known as the Messenger-Shooting Objection. This problem arises from the fact that indicative representational accounts do not seem to be able to accommodate the observation that painful experiences rationalize actions aimed towards their own removal. I present a novel representational account of painful experiences which can solve the Messenger-Shooting Objection while still being an indicative representational theory. I argue that the proposed account is (...)
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  • Can Evaluativism about unpleasant pains meet the normative condition?Jonathan Mitchell - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (7):779-802.
    ABSTRACTThis paper assesses whether Evaluativism, as a view about the nature of unpleasant pains, can meet a specific normative condition. The normative condition says whatever candidate state is offered as an analysis of unpleasant pain should be intrinsically phenomenally bad for its subject to be in. I first articulate a method reflecting this condition, called the normative contrast method, and then frame Evaluativism in detail. The view is then tested through this method. I show that Evaluativism can explain why cases (...)
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