Aydede, Murat - Is Feeling Pain the Perception of Something?

11/12/2010

The Journal of Philosophy, Vol CVI, No 10 Oct 2009

Author uses section I to develop what author calls the Initial Argument: that there is an asymmetry between the following two reports:
1) I see a dark discoloration on the back of my hand
2) I feel a jabbing pain in the back of my hand
The first is a perceptual report using linguistic categories and is considered 'extramental', verifiable, and a 'success' verb. The second seems to be like the first, and one might be invited to consider it a perceptual case just like the first. Yet author points out that, first, whatever the subject in 2) is feeling, it isn't 'in the hand'. (pg533-4) Since it's surely possible to have the pain without anything happening to the hand, and conversely it is possible to have something happening to the hand without the pain, there is an asymmetry about what the subject is attributing in 2) compared to 1). In 1), the subject is attributing an object on her hand. It can be false if there is no object on the hand. In 2), the subject is attributing a pain to her hand. But it cannot be false if there is nothing jabbing her hand-- she will still have a pain 'there'.

In 1), there is a 'premium' placed on the perceived object (pg535) in an epistemic relationship between one's (extramental) environment and one's perceptual process. In 2), there is a potential disconnect between what one feels and one's (extramental) environment, and there is no emphasis placed on the environment to validate the claim. Thus an asymmetry between 1) and 2), specifically that 1) is a report on an environmental condition, while 2) is a report of an experience (pain). So 2) does not fit into the category of perceptual reporting. Hence feeling pain is not a form of perception.

Part II fleshes out what kind of report 2) is instead: it is the experience of pain! The 'puzzle' for all involved is granting that there can be a veridical report of pain happening in a hand when really it is happening in the head. How can 2) be true if it is a report of an experience and not of what is happening extramentally in the subject's hand? The 'report' is about the hand and is, at best, 'confused'. So how can it be true? (pg537) Author discusses the Perceptualist/Representationalist account. Here, the thought is that 2) is a report on an experience that is representing that there is an extramental environmental condition like tissue damage.(pg538) Strong Representationalism claims that the qualitative content is identical to or exhausted by the representational content, which, remember, contains environmental conditions. Weak Representationalism deny the identity and hold that there can be an extra character to the phenomenal character of the pain. Author claims that all Perceptualists must be Representationalists and temporarily treats them equivalently. (pg539)

Concerning the 'puzzle' of how 2) can be a true report given this account, author says the Perceptualist splits the concept of pain into two parts, the PAINe and PAINtd (the concepts of Pain-experience and Pain-tissue-damage). Pain-e is the experience of pain-- its qualitative feel. Pain-td is what the pain-e experience represents, that there is tissue damage taking place at a location L on the body. (pg540) So the Perceptualist may claim that 2) reports of pain-td are true reports of pain-e: Pain-e is the experience of pain-td (environmental, extramental, tissue damage at L), but Pain-e may be mistaken that there is actual pain-td. But the PAINtd (having the concept of pain-rd) is veridical since pain-e really does exist-- there is a pain-td-like experience even though there may not be pain-td (due to e.g. phantom limb). Author claims to be sympathetic to this account of pain reporting, but points out that this line of argument for pain reporting is ironic to the Perceptualist's account of pain experiences. Perception, as noted above, places the 'premium' on the objects represented, while this account of pain reporting seems to place the 'premium' on the experience of the object (not the object-- tissue damage at L-- itself). (pg541) This is a kin to the asymmetry author previously described. Author describes a hallucinatory case where we discover there is no tissue damage-- this does not mean we should rescind our claim to having a pain.(pg541-2)

Here is the taxonomy: pain-td is actual or possible environmental tissue damage, giving rise to pain-e, a physical condition causing the experience of pain. Pain-e should cause the sensory concept PAINe, which is a claim that the experience of pain (pain-e) is representing pain-td at L. Finally, PAINtd is the representational concept of pain-td, but it only arises because of PAINe. So PAINtd infers there is pain-td because of PAINe. (PAINtd is used to 'express' what is represented by pain-e, or [I guess?] PAINe)

Part III is a pause in the dialectic to address a possible objection. The first is the objection that the Perceptualist account can be salvaged by adding a proviso: that mentalistic perceptions like feeling pain be 'read' "opaquely", which means that 'feeling' isn't used as success verb. So there could be the experience of pain-td (PAINe), but it wouldn't imply that there was environmental tissue damage to be located. (pg543) Author tries to explain what is going on with an 'opaque' reading: instead of a perceptual report 'going through' the concept and applying to the object, an opaque report is just a report about the experience (that is supposed to apply to the environment, but might not in many cases). (pg544) For instance, when knowingly looking at an optical illusion, one might claim to see a 'red circle', but we all understand the subject isn't talking about an environmental condition but a visual experience instead. So, the objection continues, mentalistic perceptions are perceptions, they are just taken opaquely. Author replies: it is odd that mentalistic perceptions have to be given a wide opaque berth, while usual perceptions are dominantly transparent. In other words, perceptual reports are dominantly 'committal'-- to make mentalistic reports noncommittal is to take away a key element of genuine perception. The second reply is as follows: if there are cases where pain reports are transparent, then it can be possible that the pain report a subject might give about her hand would turn out false if there was no tissue damage there. This doesn't jibe with our conception of pain. (pg545-6)

Section IV considers two other possible troubles for the author's account. The first is just a question about the validity of the author's claims about the intuitive concept of pain, especially across cultures. Reply: without data, tough to do, but I've cross-checked my own intuitions against scores of my own students and colleagues and haven't really encountered a significant divergence of intuitions. (pg546) The second is an objection that the conception of pain the author is using is a folk-psychological one, and that we shouldn't bend our philosophy of consciousness to try to accommodate folk psychology. After all, physics doesn't bend to folk physical intuitions (e.g. that heavier things fall faster). Author uses the International Association for the Study of Pain's definition of pain following this objection (pg547), and it specifically spells out a distinction between the experience of pain and tissue damage or potential tissue damage.

Section V takes on the Perceptualist by attacking the PAINe/PAINtd distinction, but simultaneously arguing that the Perceptualist needs the distinction for three reasons. (pg550-1) Author argues that Perceptualists want to treat pain reports as reports of experiences of secondary qualities, similar to reports of, say, seeing red. Yet seeing red is a transparent relation that, under normal circumstances, commits subjects to pass through the experience of seeing red and 'label' the object itself as red. (It is still a secondary quality since the primary quality for color is surface spectral reflectance--SSR) So the concept of RED has a 'labeling use' onto things like tomatoes because it can pass from the experience of redness to placing the concept RED onto the object perceived. The supposed analogy for PAINtd breaks down, according to author, since we find it acceptable to be noncommittal about whether there is any tissue damage once we have the concept of PAINtd. (pg549) We commit in genuine perceptual cases, but in mentalistic cases we don't feel that the absence of tissue damage will defeat PAINtd. At best, PAINtd is a sort-of placeholder for what PAINe is an experience of. (pg551) PAINtd is not committed to "labeling" a L on the body as suffering from tissue damage. "Even though there is an appearance/reality distinction for tissue damage (that is pain-td), we do not seem to ever label it by PAINtd, even though it represents pain-td" (pg550) The final part of section V is the move from pain reporting to pain itself and its asymmetry with perception. (pg552-3) The move here is to call sensory experiences 'transparent', meaning they have 'labeling uses' directly to the objects represented by the sensory concepts the subject experiences. What is happening here is that the criterion of 'transparency'/'labeling uses' that sensory concepts ordinarily have for the objects being represented by experiences is used against the PAINtd concept because, according to author, its only representational content is PAINe, not the tissue damage (that may or may not be) at L. (Pain-e is not transparent to PAINtd.)

Section VI uses similar arguments levied against the Perceptualist against the Strong Representationalist. The Strong Representationalist believes that the representational content of sensory concepts exhausts their phenomenal content. Here the condition used in the end of section V are slightly revised. The condition from section V was as follows:
COND: For any experiences of a given kind, they are genuinely perceptual only if they are transparent to the sensory concepts they give rise to. (pg552)
The version author accepts in section VI simply replaces 'perceptual' with 'strongly representational'. Since PAINtd doesn't have the transparency discussed earlier, author rejects Strong Representationalism.

Section VII is objections and replies.
Objection: look at neuroscience. Pain receptors and processing looks just like other sensory processing. Reply: just because it is sensory doesn't make it perceptual. To be perceptual, you have to take a sensory quality to be conceptual or categorized (pg559).

Objection: ok, have a disjunctive version of the perception of pain-- every case where it is veridical, it is perceptual, in phantom cases, it isn't perceptual. Reply: there is no good explanation of why the common practice is to get it wrong sometimes and right other. Furthermore, the asymmetry between perceptual cases and mentalistic cases remains (pg561-2)

Objection: well this is just a psuedo-problem, since pain is, metaphysically perceptual even though we don't treat it that way. Reply: This means we're psychologically mistaken about pain? So how can one be motivated to think it is perceptual? (pg563)

Author's conclusion is that we do not need a perceptual or strongly representational account of phenomenal experiences to be physicalists. Furthermore, there is something important in the fact that these 'intransitive bodily sensations' are different from perceptions in the noninferential manner expounded upon in this paper. (pg565-6)