Contribution
The paper is the systematic reply to the experimental-philosophy “bodily view” of pain. It separates objections to how the bodily view’s experiments were run from objections to what they could show even if run well. It names an alternative: the folk concept of pain is neither univocally bodily nor univocally mental, and has several dimensions on which judgements move with framing. It adds pilot vignettes, reported in outline, in which participants answered in a mind-centred way.
Key insight
From “the folk sometimes answer as if pain were bodily” it does not follow that “the folk concept of pain is bodily”, only that it is “(at least in part) Bodily” (p. 18). The same data that deny pains the Cartesian marks are open to a non-Cartesian mental reading. And a question about whether a pain is “in the mind” is heard as asking whether it is real. So the right model may be a concept whose dimensions different framings bring forward, not a single view to be discovered.
Assumptions
- The target is the folk concept. Footnote 8 grants that philosophers other than Dennett may not have claimed the mental view for the folk. The paper’s interest is “the folk view of pain” itself (p. 5).
- The bodily view needs some bodily disturbance. Footnote 19 assumes the bodily view requires “some form of bodily injury or disturbance” for a pain to exist. Otherwise “the clear blue water between the Bodily and the Mental views risks being lost”. The pilot vignettes are built on this assumption.
- Bodily and mental conceptions are incompatible. Footnote 18 agrees with the bodily view on this and leaves open whether the folk notion is coherent at all.
- Framing moves judgements. The polyeidic view’s clause (d) is assumed, not shown. The pilot vignettes are offered as framings that bring out the mental strand.
Key results
The paper is argument. Its only data of its own are the pilot results in §3.vi and footnote 20.
- The bodily view, as characterised (pp. 5–6). Two claims: “(i) pains have non-brain based bodily locations (ii) pains are not in the mind, they are not experiential states”. On referred pain, Kim et al. (2016) leave open whether the pain is where the damage is or where it is felt. So pains are not identical to damage on the view, but “properties of bodily disturbances”, and awareness of pain is “a perception of something external to the mind” (p. 6). Footnote 9: a phantom limb forces the bodily view either to allow pains at non-bodily locations or to say that awareness mislocates them.
- The evidence reviewed (pp. 7–10). Sytsma 2010 Study 5: two people joined at the leg in a three-legged race were judged to feel different pains (mean 5.4 on a 1–7 scale, 7 “clearly different pains”), and conjoined twins sharing a leg the same pain (3.29). Study 6, one replacement hand wired to two people: 3.42. Unfelt pain during distraction: mean 3.02, “significantly below the neutral point of 4”. Reuter, Phillips & Sytsma 2014: 64.5% allowed that a drug-trial participant “merely hallucinated the pain”.
- 3.i Which folk (pp. 10–12). The privacy studies had 35 and 57 participants (fn 12), some recruited through a philosophy personality-test website. The bodily view puts the folk “in diametric opposition” to the IASP definition, quoted in full, on which pain is “always subjective” and “always a psychological state”.
- 3.ii Acute against chronic pain (pp. 12–13). “All the thought experiments run by these theorists concern acute pain”. Fibromyalgia pain moves around the body or is diffuse. Footnote 16: a pain that moves cannot be individuated by its location.
- 3.iii The probe (pp. 14–15). “Is Jack’s pain in his mind?” is “extremely likely to be heard by ordinary folk as in fact asking whether Jack’s pain has a somatic (bodily) cause, or indeed whether he is really in pain”. Folk may resist saying pain “is in the mind” because of “the pejorative implicatures” even if they think of it as partly experiential.
- 3.iv Counting pains (pp. 15–16). The means are near neutral. Even the three-legged race, two legs and two people, reaches only 5.4, which the authors read as showing that “folk don’t really have very firm views about how pains get individuated”.
- 3.v Non-Cartesian mental states (pp. 16–17). The folk accept unconscious Freudian thoughts as mental. So denying privacy, subjectivity and incorrigibility to pains may show “that folk think that pain is a non-Cartesian mental state”. Footnote 17 quotes Sytsma & Reuter (2018) conceding that their results “are consistent with both”.
- 3.vi The inference (pp. 17–20). What follows is “(3*) The folk conception of pain is (at least in part) Bodily”. Pilot vignettes (from “Harrison et al, manuscript”): conjoined twins Adam and Zed share a scraped leg, and Adam says it hurts while Zed says it does not; Maya injures her wrist and says it “never actually hurt”. The scale runs from 1 “clearly agree” to 7 “clearly disagree”. “Zed has pain” averaged 5.70 and “Maya had pain from this injury” 5.79 (fn 20), and “all the results obtained in the pilot study” differed from the midpoint and supported a mental-state view. No sample size, test statistic or number of vignettes answered is given. The text says “eight scenarios”.
- The polyeidic view (pp. 21–27). “(a) the concept of pain is an amalgam of several distinct dimensions along which beliefs about pains can be ranked. b) these ideas or dimensions can conflict with one another. c) subjects hold latent positions on these rankings. d) rankings are subject to framing effects. e) positions on these dimensions have direct behavioural effects.” The candidate dimensions are mental/bodily, public/private, conscious/unconscious, aversive/non-aversive, purposeful/non-purposeful, motivational/non-motivational, and sensory or affective ones such as the McGill descriptors. There are two models: separate dimensions, which keep Hill’s paradox, or single scales between poles, which let a subject shift over time without contradiction. The authors “prima facie” prefer the second (p. 27). A weaker, pragmatic version would put the dimensions in the context of judgement, not in the concept.
- Clinical hypothesis (pp. 28–29). Clinicians may weight bodily aspects and patients experiential and affective ones. How a subject conceptualises pain “must, it seems play an intervening role” in expectation-based treatments.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | The bodily view’s experiments use small, partly self-selected samples and acute pain only | moderate as description | sample sizes from the cited papers (fn 12); the authors call the sample-size point “something of a cheap point” |
| C2 | Asking whether a pain is “in the mind” is heard as asking whether it is real or somatic | weak | argued from clinical observation; not tested |
| C3 | The bodily view’s key means are close to neutral | moderate as description | 3.29, 3.42, 5.4 from Sytsma 2010 as reported |
| C4 | Denial of the Cartesian marks is consistent with a non-Cartesian mental view of pain | strong as an argument | Freudian unconscious analogy; conceded by Sytsma & Reuter (fn 17) |
| C5 | The data support only “the folk conception of pain is (at least in part) Bodily” | strong as logic, given C4 | the step from (2) to (3) and its missing premise |
| C6 | In some framings, folk answer as if pain were a mental, experiential state | weak | pilot means 5.70 and 5.79; no n, no tests, eight scenarios in an unpublished manuscript |
| C7 | The folk concept of pain is polyeidic: several dimensions, latent positions, framing-sensitive | weak; a proposal | no test; the authors leave the dimensions and their model open |
| C8 | Differences in weighting of these dimensions impede patient–clinician communication about chronic pain | weak; a hypothesis | cited clinical literature on frustration; no data |
Concepts
- Bodily view of pain — the experimental philosophers’ claim that the folk locate pains in non-brain body parts and do not treat them as experiential states.
- Paradox of pain — Hill’s (2005) claim that the folk concept treats pain as both mental and bodily.
- Cartesian marks — privacy, subjectivity (existence depends on awareness) and incorrigibility.
- Polyeidic concept — a concept made of several dimensions, possibly conflicting, on which people hold latent and framing-sensitive positions.
- Multidimensionality of pain — psychology’s biopsychosocial view, which the polyeidic view refines and grounds in the concept.
Connections
The paper answers Sytsma (2010), Reuter, Phillips & Sytsma (2014), Kim et al. (2016), Reuter (2017) and Sytsma & Reuter (2018). It draws on Hill’s paradox of pain, on Aydede’s work on the IASP definition, and on Corns (2014) against unitary accounts of pain. It sets Klein’s imperative and Bain’s evaluative theories of pain as each tracking one dimension. It cites Reuter, Sienhold & Sytsma (2018) only in its bibliography and in a list of the bodily view’s advocates. None was read here.
Bearing on the record
- The rubber hand THEORYs: no bearing. THEORY-766, THEORY-769, THEORY-767 and THEORY-768 are about ownership and the reports synchronous stimulation produces. This paper is about the concept of pain. It meets no promotion test, partly or wholly, and touches no refutation condition. Nothing in it concerns agency, so nothing bears on THEORY-458.
- Felt location and referred touch. Footnotes 9 and 19 discuss referred pain (felt in the arm, damage in the heart) and phantom pain (felt where no limb is). In each, a sensation’s felt location comes apart from its bodily source, which is the structure of referred touch in THEORY-766. The point the paper makes is about what the bodily view must say pain is in such cases. It reports no judgement or experience of felt location, and nothing about multisensory conflict. So the likeness is one of structure, and it is mine. It is not evidence for or against the referred-touch clause.
- The framing point and the suggestion debate. Clause (d), that judgements are “subject to framing effects”, is at the level of a concept what THEORY-766 worries about at the level of report: answers moved by how the question is put. The parallel is mine and methodological only. These are judgements about vignettes, not reports by stimulated participants, and they give nothing toward the expectation-matched test THEORY-766 asks for.
- THEORY-767 and interoception. The paper does not mention interoception. No bearing.
- THEORY-045 (felt affect is the experience of the body’s regulatory state). The bodily view, as Borg et al. state it, makes awareness of pain “a perception of something external to the mind - the bodily pain state” (p. 6). That has the same shape as THEORY-045’s claim that what is felt is a state of the body. The IASP definition the authors defend makes pain “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience”, which is THEORY-045’s felt layer with its valence. Both pairings are mine. Neither paper studies what is felt, so neither bears on THEORY-045’s promotion test, which asks for manipulations of interoceptive signalling. The folk concept could be bodily, mental or polyeidic with THEORY-045 true or false.
- QUESTION-059. The pilot vignettes ask whether damage that is never felt is pain, and the answers lean to no. That is a fact about the folk use of “pain”. It is not a case of a regulatory role met without feeling, which is what the question would need. No bearing.
- QUESTION-048. The paper makes the distinction the record keeps. Folk judgements about vignettes are evidence about a concept and its pragmatics, and the paper’s whole argument is that they shift with framing. They establish how people classify pain under a given question. They do not establish where pain is or what it is. Borg et al. do not draw a metaphysical conclusion from their pilot data, and their discussion of reduction (p. 27) is conditional on the polyeidic model.
- Self and persons (TERM-045, THEORY-417, ADR-024). The privacy studies ask whether two people can share one pain. That is a question about individuating pains, not persons or selves. No bearing.
- LIT-635 (NOTE-511). Block’s “phenomenism” holds that pain has phenomenal character beyond any representation. Borg et al. appeal to the intuition that “there is a particular way that they feel” (p. 18). This is an appeal to the same intuition, not support for Block.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice.
Limitations
- Its own data are a footnote. The pilot gives two means, no sample size, no tests and no list of the eight scenarios. Each vignette also says outright that the person reports no pain, so “has pain” may be read as asking whether he or she felt any. That is the kind of loaded probe the paper objects to in its opponents.
- Not a reply to Reuter, Sienhold & Sytsma. The pain-in-mouth studies are not discussed. The objections in 3.iii and 3.iv do not reach them: they do not ask whether pain is “in the mind”, and their means for pain are well below neutral.
- The polyeidic view has no test. Its dimensions are suggested, not derived. The criteria for a “genuine dimension” are deferred (fn 27). The choice between models is left open, and so is whether the dimensions are in the concept or in the pragmatics.
- Version. Read from a revise-and-resubmit manuscript. The published text may differ, including in the pilot figures.
Open questions
- Does a probe without the “in the mind” implicature, run with the same participants and both a bodily and an experiential framing, move the same people along a mental/bodily scale? That is the test of clauses (c) and (d).
- Do people with chronic or diffuse pain answer the bodily view’s vignettes differently from people without?
- Does the pain-in-mouth result (Reuter, Sienhold & Sytsma 2019) survive a framing that stresses the experience of the pain over the injury?