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A defense of perceptual accounts of pain| old_uid | 8861 |
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| title | A defense of perceptual accounts of pain |
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| start_date | 2010/06/08 |
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| schedule | 14h-16h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Salle 28 156 |
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| summary | Perceptual accounts of pain (PAP) are very popular these days. Nonetheless, they are also under heavy attack, because these accounts seem to be vulnerable to certain severe challenges and objections, and incompatible with our commonsense and scientific understanding of pain. As I argue, these arguments against PAP are based on a number of premises, which are dispensable for PAP proponents. Therefore, as an argument against PAP in general, they fail. They also rely on unfortunate assumptions about the nature of perceptual accounts. I will propose a perceptual account of pain that avoids the mentioned problems and is more compatible with several empirical data. I claim that the pain is the object of perception rather than that pain is the experience of the object of perception, in contrast to most PAP accounts.
I claim that to be in pain is to be in a complex state. The components of this state include certain sensational components (a number of related qualia), as well as affective attitudes. But these components are not simply additive components. Pain is seen as involving non-psychological as well as psychological components. When subjects experience pain they are in a certain sort of psychological state towards a bodily state or condition. Pain is constituted by the bodily state though, not by the psychological state towards this bodily state. So I argue for a perceptual theory that identifies pain states with parts of our internal representation of our body’s physiological condition, a representation that registers physiological imbalance, and potential tissue damage. A perceptual process creates a pain-quale, but the object of the perception is the pain (a bodily state), not the feeling of pain. |
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| responsibles | Legrand |
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