intentionalism and pain

INTENTIONALISM AND PAIN

B D B

Pain may appear to undermine the radically intentionalist view that the phenomenal character of anyexperience is entirely constituted by its representational content. That appearance is illusory. Aftercategorizing versions of pain intentionalism along two dimensions, I argue that an ‘objectivist’ and‘non-mentalist’ version is the most promising, if it can withstand two objections concerning (a) whatwe say when in pain, and (b) the distinctiveness of pain. I rebut these objections, in a way availableto both opponents of and adherents to the view that experiential content is entirely conceptual.

There is ‘something it is like’ for a subject to undergo a visual experience,e.g., of a red cube; the experience has phenomenal character. It also hasrepresentational content: being its subject involves representing somethingas being the case, e.g., that there is a red cube in front of oneself. The traditionalview holds (postponing a qualification) that some aspect of the phenomenalcharacter of an experience is constitutively independent of any content ithas; by contrast, ‘radical intentionalists’ hold that an experience’s pheno-menal character is wholly constituted by its content. This intentionalistrevolution, applied to perceptual experiences, is currently taking hold, forgood reason. But it is often thought that more comprehensive intention-alism, applied to experience in general, is blocked by the bodily sensations.I disagree.

‘Pain experiences’, experiences in virtue of which subjects are in pain,have phenomenal character, yet many philosophers think not only that theyresist radically intentionalist treatment, but that they are ‘representationallyblank’. As Richard Rorty puts it, ‘pains are not intentional – they donot represent, they are not about anything’.1 Many agree: Block, McGinn,O’Shaughnessy, Searle, and perhaps Davidson and Peacocke.2 Even those

1 R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, ), p. .2 N. Block, ‘On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness’, Behavioural and Brain

Sciences, (), pp. –, at p. ; C. McGinn, The Character of Mind (Oxford UP, ),p. ; B. O’Shaughnessy, The Will (Cambridge UP, ), Vol. , pp. –; J. Searle, TheRediscovery of the Mind (MIT Press, ), p. ; D. Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, repr. in his Essayson Actions and Events (Oxford UP, ), pp. –, at p. ; C. Peacocke, Sense and Content(Oxford UP, ), p. , but see also his ‘Consciousness and Other Minds’, Proceedings of theAristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. (), pp. –.

The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. , No. October ISSN –

© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, . Published by Blackwell Publishing, Garsington Road, Oxford , UK,and Main Street, Malden, , USA.

who disagree often reject radical intentionalism, at least in the pain case, forexample, Boghossian, Evans and Velleman.3

I propose to defend radical intentionalism precisely in the pain case. Onmy taxonomy, intentionalists about pain must choose between ‘mentalism’and ‘non-mentalism’. In §§I–III, I touch on difficulties facing the mental-ist, and formulate a non-mentalist alternative. I then turn to my main task:to see whether non-mentalism can withstand two serious objections which Isuspect underlie many philosophers’ misgivings about the account.

I. MENTALISM

The diagram below shows how I cut up the territory:

Radical intentionalists take the phenomenal character of pain experiences toconsist wholly in their content; so if being a pain experience is entirely aphenomenal matter, it is entirely a representational matter. I shall omit thelabel ‘radical’ from now on, but it distinguishes this view from another (seeEvans, pp. –), that although pain experiences have content, they arepain experiences at least partly in virtue of properties that are both pheno-menal and non-representational – ‘qualia’, or ‘sensational properties’, as Iuse those terms.

The intentionalist about pain must choose first between mentalism andnon-mentalism, i.e., between claiming and denying that the content of painexperiences is specified, at least partly, by mental concepts, like pain or


© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly,

3 P. Boghossian and D. Velleman, ‘Colour as a Secondary Quality’, Mind, (),pp. –, at p. ; G. Evans, Varieties of Reference (Oxford UP, ), pp. –. Forfurther references, see A. Byrne, ‘Intentionalism Defended’, Philosophical Review, (),pp. –, at p. .

Hurting perceptualism (HP) +subjectivist account of hurting

?

Micro injury perceptualism

Macro injury perceptualism

Subjectivism

Objectivism

Mentalism

Subjectivism

Non-mentalism

hurting with injuryHP + identification of

simple view of hurtingHP + Cornman’s

ObjectivismRadical intentionalism

subjectivist account of painsMcDowell: act-object view +

hurting; and secondly, between subjectivism and objectivism, i.e., betweenclaiming and denying that the subject-matter of pain experiences is, at leastpartly, constitutively dependent on its being represented in such experi-ences. The first distinction is between classes of psychosemantic view aboutwhat circumstances pain experiences represent; the second is betweenclasses of metaphysical view about what it is for those circumstances to obtain.

I start with mentalism. John McDowell is a mentalist subjectivist.4 Asa mentalist, he holds that pain experiences are episodes of awareness ofmental items, namely, pains. As a subjectivist, he thinks a pain’s existingconsists in its being experienced as a pain. Another form of mentalism,‘hurting perceptualism’, holds that pain experiences represent body partsas hurting, and, on a subjectivist version, that what it is for a body part tohurt is for it to be represented as hurting.

This allows a better description of my target. I said that the traditionalview holds that at least some aspect of the phenomenal character of anexperience is independent of its content. But this omits a central strand inthe tradition, the sense-datum theory, according to which undergoing per-ceptual experiences involves awareness of subjective items. This is hopelessas an account of the objective content of experiences; but what if it claimsthat experiences have only inner content, in which their phenomenal char-acter entirely consists? This is a version of radical intentionalism. Butcontemporary intentionalists have not taken this view of perceptual ex-periences; they oppose not only blank qualia, but also sense-data. Similarly,when it comes to pain experiences, I depart from McDowell in preferringversions of intentionalism that invoke only objective content.

Why? Here, briefly, are two problems with subjectivism. The first is thedependence problem. It is questionable whether we can, as I think we must,understand an experience as being an episode of concept-involvingawareness of an item x as being F, if we hold that x’s existence and its beingF consist in its being that experience’s object. So a subject’s experiencing apain is difficult to construe as a piece of genuine conceptual recognition, anepisode in which a pain is correctly classified as being a pain, if the subjectcould not have deployed some concept other than pain in his awareness ofthat item. Yet that is what McDowell’s subjectivism implies: the subjectindeed could not have deployed some concept other than pain, since theobject of awareness, the pain, depends on his bringing it under that veryconcept. I have put this objection in terms of concept-involving experiences,

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4 See McDowell, ‘One Strand in the Private Language Argument’, repr. in his Mind, Value,and Reality (Harvard UP, ), pp. –; ‘Intentionality and Interiority in Wittgenstein’,repr. in Mind, Value, and Reality, pp. –; Mind and World (Harvard UP, ), esp. pp. –of Lecture , pp. – of Lecture , and p. .

but I suspect a version of it arises even for those who go in for non-conceptual content. In any case, McDowell famously does not, so his view isdirectly under threat.

Subjectivism’s second weakness is the circularity problem. Some claimthat what it is for an object to be red is for it to be disposed to cause visualexperiences of a certain type. The relevant type, for intentionalist versions ofthe view, is this: experiences representing objects as being red. At this pointa familiar objection is that it is viciously circular for an account of what it isfor objects to be red to advert to experiences representing objects as,precisely, being red. My point is straightforward: if this view of redness isindeed viciously circular, then so are subjectivist views of what is representedby a pain experience, holding, for example, that what it is for a body part tobe hurting is for it to be experienced as, precisely, hurting.

Here I cannot do more than register those worries. It might seem that thementalist could avoid them anyway, by embracing objectivism. James Corn-man is a hurting perceptualist who models hurting on colours conceived asobjective, along the lines of John Campbell’s ‘simple view’.5 Campbell takescolours to be occurrent and irreducible – objective, metaphysically ‘trans-parent’ qualities grounding the relevant sensory dispositions. And that isCornman’s view of hurting. An alternative form of objectivism would claimthat hurting can be reduced to some physiological condition.

But both versions face a problem. Unlike an object’s being red, a limb’shurting is of itself a phenomenal matter; yet mentalist objectivism impliesthe possibility of a severed limb’s hurting independently of any conscioussubject. Together these claims require that hurting must be a quale (a non-representational phenomenal property), and, oddly, one instantiated not byexperiences, but by body parts. This is not only inconsistent with in-tentionalism, but arguably incoherent, implying that things might seemsomehow, but not to a conscious subject.

Was I too quick to say a limb’s hurting is a phenomenal matter? I thinknot. For example, if Ed is in pain because he is aware of his hurting rightarm, while Ted is the same subject in a counterfactual situation, lacking aright arm, then giving Ted two things would suffice for his right arm also tohurt: an attached right arm, and a pain experience subjectively indis-tinguishable from Ed’s. The worry is how to make sense of this, if you thinkhurting is an objective property. (If you conjoin mentalist objectivism with aform of disjunctivism for which experiences’ predicative contents are world-dependent, then you can explain why giving Ted the same experience as



5 J.W. Cornman, ‘Might a Tooth Ache But There Be No Toothache?’, Australasian Journalof Philosophy, (), pp. –; J. Campbell, ‘The Simple View of Colour’, in J. Haldane andC. Wright (eds), Reality, Representation, and Projection (Oxford UP, ), pp. –.

Ed’s implies that he will have a hurting right arm. That is why I frame thethesis in terms of a subjectively indistinguishable pain experience.6)

To sum up: if mentalism is unacceptable in conjunction with eithersubjectivism or objectivism, then it is unacceptable simpliciter. In this section,I have argued for that conditional’s antecedent. The argument is far fromconclusive, but my main aim is to see where intentionalism is left ifmentalism has to go.

II. INJURY PERCEPTUALISM

Rejecting mentalism leaves the intentionalist with non-mentalism. And it isthe following non-mentalist (and objectivist) view that I shall defend:

Injury Perceptualism

Three comments: first, ‘P ’ is a place-holder for a term referring to somephysiological property. But which? Here are two options: for the microinjury perceptualist it is some arcane microphysiological condition, such asfiring ‘nociceptors’;7 for macro injury perceptualists it is some macro-level property such as ‘disorder’,8 where a body part’s being disordered is amatter of its being in (or nearly being in, or developing) a pathological con-dition, a matter of its having something wrong with it. I shall largely focuson macro injury perceptualism.

Secondly, by ‘somatosensory experiences’ I mean experiences belongingto what might be regarded as a sixth sense, ‘body sense’, by which one isaware of one’s own body, not by means of the five exteroceptive senses, butrather ‘from the inside’, as when one knows the location of one’s limbsindependently of looking, touching, hearing or smelling. This poses adifficult question for the injury perceptualist: he thinks seeing your body’sinjured state is not painful, but somatosensorily perceiving it is painful; butcan an account of this phenomenological difference be given in purely

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6 I am grateful here to an anonymous referee.7 E.g., D.M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

), pp. –.8 E.g., G. Pitcher, ‘Pain Perception’, Philosophical Review, (), pp. –, at p. .

. A’s being in pain (feelingor having a pain)

. A’s having or feeling apain in a body part O

(at location L), or O’shurting

consists in

consists in

A’s having a somatosensory ex-perience as of a part of his bodybeing in some physiological state P

A’s somatosensorily perceiving O

as being in P (and at L)

representational terms, or must it mention distinctively somatosensoryqualia? Radical intentionalists are committed to the former option, of course;so in the final section I provide just such an account. For now, ‘somato-sensory’ and its cognates are promissory notes.

Finally, it is clear what any ‘intentionalist’ view amounts to only so far asit is clear what its adherents mean by ‘content’. There are many accounts ofcontent, but my use of the notion is meant to be relatively free of theoreticalcommitment. My definition of intentionalism, for example, excludes neitheradherents to nor opponents of the idea that the content of experiences ispartly non-conceptual. I propose the following: what it is for a mentalepisode to have content is for it to be accessible to its subject and to have, ofitself, a truth-value. Two things need emphasis. First, the relevant notion isaccessible content, i.e., personal-level representation. By contrast, the sort of‘informational content’ that cognitive psychologists invoke (to explain anorganism’s catching a ball, for example, by citing computational states‘representing’ arcane laws and data about the ball’s trajectory) is sub-personal ‘content’, and not the notion my intentionalist is using. Secondly,representational content is ‘non-derivative’. To be representational, a men-tal episode must itself have a truth-value. It is insufficient that the episodestrikes the subject in a way from which he then infers truth-evaluable judge-ments. Rather the episode must itself be contentful: the subject’s undergoingit must of itself be a matter of his truly or falsely representing how things are.Philosophers differ about what an experience’s having such content re-quires. But my use of this theoretically thin notion means that those who getthat matter wrong are not thereby disqualified from being intentionalists.

Despite this neutrality, I should mention the dispute about conceptualcontent. ‘Conceptualists’ hold that experiential content is entirely concep-tual in the sense that having a contentful experience requires possession ofthe concepts specifying its content, where exacting conditions are imposedon concept possession – for example, having inferential capacities and evena natural language. Most injury perceptualists reject this.9 By contrast,McDowell, while rejecting injury perceptualism, insists on it. One of myaims is to make injury perceptualism available to conceptualists. So for thepurposes of this paper, I forswear non-conceptual content, even though thisblocks various ways of alleviating the injury perceptualist’s difficulties, andeven though many philosophers take pain experiences especially to demandnon-conceptual content.

Here is one difficulty conceptualism immediately raises: what are we tosay about creatures that are seemingly capable of pain experiences but not



9 For example, F. Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (MIT Press, ); W. Lycan, Consciousnessand Experience (MIT Press, ); M. Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (MIT Press, ).

of the relevant concepts? This is an instance of a quite general problem, onefaced not only by conceptualists about pain experiences, nor only by con-ceptualists about experiences generally, but also, for example, by those whohold that the content of beliefs is conceptual. What, they will be asked, arewe to say about creatures that are seemingly capable of beliefs but not of therelevant concepts? At this stage, many philosophers suggest that thoughsuch creatures lack beliefs, they have states analogous to beliefs in variousrespects – proto-beliefs, as José Luis Bermúdez calls them.10 I suggest that amove parallel to this might handle the problem of creatures seeminglycapable of pain but not of the relevant concepts. Here, though, is not theplace to pursue the proposal.11

III. DEFENDING INJURY PERCEPTUALISM

Why is injury perceptualism attractive? Because intentionalism is attractive,and injury perceptualism avoids the problems of mentalism. But why is in-tentionalism attractive? The reasons, well aired in the literature, are various.Intentionalist accounts of being in pain permit the following explanation ofpain’s locations, for example: what we describe as ‘the location of a pain’ isreally the bodily location at which is represented whatever item pain experi-ences represent. This defuses puzzles associated with our talk of locatedpains. Injury perceptualism, for example, handles phantom-limb cases well,implying that when Nelson had a phantom-limb pain experience, he did nothave a pain anywhere, since injury perceptualism’s second clause wasnot satisfied (Nelson lacked a limb of the represented sort at the representedlocation). Nevertheless clause () ensures that Nelson was still in pain, sincehe was undergoing an experience (albeit hallucinatory) as of a part of hisbody being disordered.

Intentionalism about pain experiences also fits smoothly into a radicallyintentionalist account of the mind, an account that conceives of the mental-ity of mental items in terms of their possession of content – their constitutinga subject’s perspective on the world. We could, on this view, do withoutqualia, and that is something to be glad of. For one thing, the relationbetween the mental and its behavioural manifestations is more puzzling inthe case of qualia than in the case of intentional states: the former raises bothmetaphysical worries about qualia and epistemological concerns about howwe are to know about others’ qualia. For another thing, McDowell has

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10 J.L. Bermúdez, The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (MIT Press, ), ch. .11 See McDowell on the ‘proto-subjectivity’ of animals, e.g., Mind and World, pp. –,

–, –, –.

argued (in Mind and World ) that only states with content, indeed fullyconceptual content, could constitute reasons for judgements. If McDowell isright (a big ‘if ’, but I am sympathetic), then it becomes unclear how we aresupposed to know even about our own qualia. Again, McDowell thinks painexperiences need to and can rationalize judgements, including judgementsthat one is oneself in pain, but only if they are contentful.

This is merely a thumbnail sketch of the arguments. But I now turn to myprincipal task, to defend injury perceptualism against two serious objections:the problem of mentalistic idioms and the distinctiveness problem.

IV. THE PROBLEM OF MENTALISTIC IDIOMS

When Sue sees a red apple, we can report the following: her experience; theperceptual judgements in which she endorses (part of) the experience’scontent; and the judgements in which she self-ascribes the experience. (Myexamples are of experiences involved in perceivings. This makes theembedded content-sentences more straightforward, especially for disjunc-tivists, who want to say that the contents of veridical perceivings andhallucinations must differ. It is not meant to imply that only experiencesinvolved in perceivings can be self-ascribed.)

A. It seems to Sue as though this apple is red [perceptual experience]A. Sue judges that this apple is red [perceptual judgement]A. Sue judges that it seems to her as though this apple is red. [self-ascription]

In the pain case, injury perceptualism suggests the following parallels:

B. It feels to Sue as though her left foot is disordered

B. Sue judges that her left foot is disordered

B. Sue judges that it feels to her as though her left foot is disordered.

The worry is that (B) and (B) seem not to be the judgements we in factmake on the basis of our pain experiences – those apparently expressed bywhat we say when in pain. In particular, (B) and (B) arguably do lessjustice to the ordinary situation than (C) and (C), as follows:

C. Sue judges that her left foot hurts, or that she has a pain in her left foot

C. Sue judges that she is in pain, or that it feels to her as though her left foot hurts

(or has a pain in it ).

Where the injury perceptualist might expect Sue to say ‘My left foot isdisordered’, for example, it would be more natural for her to say ‘My leftfoot hurts’. And that raises a further worry, for if ‘My left foot hurts’ is a



perceptual judgement, simply endorsing the content of Sue’s experience,then the injury perceptualist cannot deny that hurting is represented by thatexperience.

The objections, then, are twofold: what the injury perceptualist wouldhave us judge, we do not; and what we do judge, and express in mentalisticvocabulary, the injury perceptualist is unable to account for. Those whotake pain experiences to be non-conceptual episodes may find these objec-tions less pressing than conceptualists do. Tye (p. ), for example, suggeststhat it is of ‘no significance’ what a subject says when in pain.12 But, forconceptualists particularly, a more robust response is surely desirable.

So, starting with the second problem, can injury perceptualists explainSue’s utterance of ‘My left foot hurts’? I think they can. Indeed, an accountof that utterance is already encapsulated in their second clause – that for abody part to hurt is for it to be experienced as disordered. This makes ‘My leftfoot hurts’ a self-ascription of an experience, not a perceptual judgementendorsing the experience’s content. Use of that sentence, therefore, does notimply that pain experiences represent hurting. Moreover, as a self-ascriptionof an experience, the fact that the report involves the mentalistic term ‘hurts’is less surprising than non-mentalists ought otherwise to find it.

But worries persist. For one thing, ‘My left foot hurts’ still looks verymuch like the expression of a perceptual judgement, simply endorsingthe content of the subject’s experience. For another, even if the relevantutterances are self-ascriptions of experiences, the fact that they involve suchmentalistic terms as ‘in pain’, ‘a pain’ and ‘hurting’ may continue to appearstrange in the light of the injury perceptualist’s insistence that such termsrefer neither to items represented by pain experiences nor to qualia theyinstantiate.

Here I think injury perceptualists should take their cue from a briefremark David Armstrong once made (Bodily Sensations, p. ), and developas a model for ‘My left foot hurts’ the sentence ‘My left foot is blurred’, saidperhaps by Sue as she looks down at her foot through tears. Here are threeplausible claims. First, ‘My left foot is blurred’ and ‘My left foot looksblurred’ are equivalent. Hence it would be odd to say either ‘My left footis blurred, though it doesn’t look it’ or ‘My left foot looks blurred, thoughit isn’t’. (It has been suggested to me that we never say ‘x is blurred’. Myopinion differs, as must the opinion of those who think that ‘blurred’ refersto an objective property. Unlike those philosophers, though, I might con-cede that ‘x is blurred’ is elliptical for ‘x looks blurred’ without underminingthe points I am about to make.)

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12 Tye makes the point in a slightly different context. See also Pitcher, pp. , , ;Armstrong, Bodily Sensations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), p. .

Secondly, at least part of the role of both sentences is to self-ascribe visualexperiences. Thirdly, the experiences they self-ascribe neither instantiateblurry qualia (contra Boghossian and Velleman, pp. –), nor represent theproperty being blurred. Admittedly, to make this final claim plausible, I mustsuggest some alternative account of the content of blurred experiences.Armstrong (p. ) thinks they represent the light as dim, the air as mistyand the outlines of objects as wavering. But surely that is what causes thingsto look blurred; it is not the content of the experiences in which they do so.It is better to say that blurred experiences have spatial content that isincomplete or indeterminate and does not enable the subject to ascertain theposition of the object’s edges precisely. But either way, the crucial point isthat blurred experiences do not represent a property being blurred, nor doesthe term ‘blurred’ refer to some blank quale they instantiate.

This account ought to steady the nerves of injury perceptualists. For herewe have phenomena that parallel those they have to tolerate in the paincase. For one thing, ‘My left foot is blurred’ looks like an expression of aperceptual judgement, endorsing the content of an experience, just as ‘Myleft foot is pink’ does; but actually it is not. And that is just what the injuryperceptualist has to say about ‘My left foot hurts’. For another thing, theterm ‘blurred’ is used in a self-ascription of an experience, ‘My left foot isblurred’, even though it refers neither to a property represented by thatexperience nor to a quale it instantiates. And again this is just what the injuryperceptualist has to say about ‘hurts’ in ‘My left foot hurts’, and indeedabout such mentalistic vocabulary as ‘in pain’ and ‘a pain’.

Admittedly, the steadfast opponent of injury perceptualism may want anexplanation of why we sometimes use ‘blurred’ and ‘hurting’ to report ex-periences. Perhaps the reason in the pain case is that the sentence ‘I amsomatosensorily perceiving my left foot as disordered’ is a mouthful; andsince the information it expresses often needs to be conveyed urgently, wehave adopted ‘hurts’ as a convenient shorthand.

So much for the judgements we clearly do make on the basis of our painexperiences. What about the earlier challenge, that we do not make thejudgements injury perceptualists should expect us to? Well, we can just denythis. It is not true that we never report pain experiences by means of a termreferring to disorder. We sometimes say, on the basis of pain experiences,‘My left foot has something wrong with it’ and ‘It feels as though it hassomething wrong with it’. The injury perceptualist can take these as aperceptual judgement and a self-ascription of a pain experience, respec-tively. Indeed, even the micro injury perceptualist can handle the objection,and claim that we make pain-based judgements about, say, firing noci-ceptors. Admittedly, you do not need the concept firing nociceptors in order to



be in pain. But surely you can use demonstrative–predicative modes ofpresentation (see McDowell, Mind and World ), and hence you can representwhat are in fact firing nociceptors as ‘that process’. Hence you might judgeon the basis of your pain experience either ‘My left foot is undergoing thatprocess’ or ‘It feels as though it is ...’.

In short, it is far from clear that our use of mentalistic idioms on the basisof pain experiences requires a mentalistic account of their content. So much,then, for the first objection.

V. DISTINCTIVENESS: TALKING THE TALK OF INTERIORITY

The distinctiveness problem has two strands. The first, borrowing Mackie’sterm, is a ‘queerness objection’.13 But whereas Mackie complains that vari-ous items are too queer to be countenanced, the current objection is that theinjury perceptualist has not made the pain case queer enough. The secondstrand concerns whether an intentionalist can account for the existence ofany phenomenal difference between somatosensorily feeling disorder andseeing it. I start with the queerness point.

McDowell (‘Intentionality and Interiority’, p. ) complains that, forthe injury perceptualist, sensations ‘lose their interiority’. ‘The interiorityintuition’ is the compelling if inchoate thought that there is somethingidiosyncratic about pain experiences, some way in which they or their ob-jects are ‘inner’ or ‘subjective’, some way in which the relationship betweenthem and their subject-matter is more intimate than the relationshipbetween ordinary perceptual experiences and theirs. One way of capturingthis idea has been to assert that the subject-matter of pain experiences isradically ‘private’: necessarily, only I have access to my pains, only you toyours. Another way has been to claim that pain experiences are episodesof infallible awareness of a self-intimating subject-matter: necessarily, if itseems to Sue as though she has a pain, then she has; and if she has one, thenit seems to her as though she has. Infallibility and self-intimation, in turn,have been accounted for by embracing the view jettisoned earlier, namely,mentalist subjectivism. For the subjectivist will say that the reason why apain is self-intimating is simply that its being experienced is what it is for itto exist.

As an objectivist and non-mentalist view, by contrast, injury perceptual-ism seems hard pressed to say anything about interiority, except whatArmstrong says (A Materialist Theory, p. ): that the circumstances a subjectrepresents in pain experiences are sometimes literally inside the body, and

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13 J.L. Mackie, Ethics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), p. .

consequently that first-person judgements based on those experiences willtypically be more authoritative than anyone else’s. In short, then, injuryperceptualism risks making pain experiences and their subject-matter seemrather ordinary.

I think injury perceptualists can do better than this. For one thing, Iargue in the remainder of this section that by focusing on the way in whichwe talk about our pain experiences, and on the relationship between suchexperiences and not their subject-matter, but rather the subject’s attentionand self-ascriptions of those experiences, injury perceptualists can identifysignificant peculiarities in the pain case, peculiarities they can plausiblyaccuse opponents of having misconstrued as self-intimation and infallibility.And in the final section I shall argue that by focusing on the distinctivenessof somatosensory modes of presentation, the injury perceptualist can explainthe differences between pain and visual experiences, without holding thatpain experiences represent items that are mental, private, subjective, self-intimating or infallibly accessible. Together, these moves demonstrate ‘thesurprising degree to which injury perceptualism can accommodate the inter-iority intuition’, and in a way that goes far beyond pointing out that disorderis sometimes literally inside the body.

V.. Talking the talk of infallibility and self-intimation

If ‘the interiority intuition’ is glossed as the claim that pain experiences areinfallible episodes of awareness of a self-intimating subject-matter, the injuryperceptualist cannot accommodate it. This can seem problematic, if thefollowing seem plausible:

. Sue’s foot is hurting iff Sue’s foot feels to be hurting. There is a pain in Sue’s foot iff there feels to be a pain in Sue’s foot. Sue has a pain in her foot iff Sue feels a pain in her foot.

But even if those claims are plausible, the problem seems less serious oncewe reflect on

. Sue’s foot is blurred iff Sue’s foot looks blurred. Sue has an experience of red iff Sue experiences an experience of red.

After all, () is true. But it is true not because blurred experiences areepisodes of infallible awareness of a self-intimating property being blurred, butrather because the sentences on its right- and left-hand sides are justdifferent ways of saying the same thing. So too with (). It is not that one’shaving an experience of red consists in that experience’s being the object ofsome further experience. Rather, just as we talk not only of one’s having asmile (or smiling), but also of one’s smiling a smile, so too we speak not only



of one’s having an experience (or experiencing), but also of one’s experi-encing an experience (Tye, Ten Problems, p. ). This is just a fact aboutordinary language, not the highroad to inner sense, let alone to claimsabout infallible experiences of self-intimating subject-matters.

Surely the injury perceptualist can make the same move regarding (), (),and (), claiming that their left- and right-hand sides are just different waysof saying the same thing, and idiomatic ways of saying it. This requires thatthe injury perceptualist must allow, not implausibly, that just as ‘experi-ences’ in ‘Sue experiences an experience’ is not functioning as it is in ‘Sueexperiences the pencil’, so too ‘feels to be’ in ‘Sue’s foot feels to be hurting’ isnot functioning as it is in ‘Sue’s foot feels to be hot’. (By counting thesesentences as ‘idiomatic’, I mean to avoid the following diagnosis: ‘experi-ences’ is ambiguous, and on the right-hand side of () it means ‘undergoes’,not ‘is aware of’. That might seem acceptable for (), but there is no paralleltranslation for ‘feels’ to which the injury perceptualist could appeal on theright-hand sides of () and (), for example. Incidentally, the left-hand sidesof (), (), and () are also idiomatic for the injury perceptualist; and againthis is better than assuming, as Tye and Pitcher sometimes seem to, that ‘apain’ really means ‘a pain experience’ – as if ‘I have a pain in my foot’means ‘I have a pain experience in my foot’.)

So if the objection is that injury perceptualists cannot accommodateclaims such as (), (), and (), this is mistaken: they can. Hence while theplausibility of such claims might explain an opponent’s commitment to self-intimation and infallibility, it does not vindicate that commitment.

I now turn to three implementations of another injury perceptualiststrategy: finding surrogates for the notions of self-intimation, infallibility,subjectivity and privacy, and finding them somewhere other than in therelationship between pain experiences and their subject-matter.

V.. Surrogates for infallibility, self-intimation, subjectivity and privacy

First, it may appear from examples such as

SA. Sue has a pain iff it seems to Sue as though she has a pain

that pain experiences are episodes of infallible awareness of a self-intimatingsubject-matter. But actually (SA) admits of another interpretation, oneacceptable to injury perceptualists. For they can take the representationalepisode reported by (SA)’s right-hand side to be a self-ascriptive judgement,not an experience, and allow that self-ascriptions of pain experiences may beinfallible, even though the experiences themselves are not. The same pointgoes for self-intimation: to whatever extent other perceptual experiences in-timate themselves to self-ascriptive judgements, pain experiences can too. So

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any opponent of injury perceptualism who merely insists on (SA) has failedto say anything the injury perceptualist needs to deny.

Secondly, such claims as

SU. There are no objective pains, nor any objective instances of hurting:every pain, and every instance of hurting, must be had or felt orexperienced by some subject

PR. No one else can have or feel my pains, or the instances of hurting thatI feel

are easily taken to imply that pains are subjective objects of logically privateawareness. But (SU) and (PR) also admit of interpretations more congenialfor the injury perceptualist. Regarding (SU), the injury perceptualist canmake three conciliatory remarks. First, pain experiences are experience-dependent, of course, in the sense that they are themselves experiences.Secondly, there are indeed no objectively hurting objects. One’s left foot canbe (or feel to be) hurting only if there is some way in which it is experiencedas being; it is just that the way in which the left foot must be experienced asbeing, for it to hurt, is disordered, not hurting. Similarly there are noobjectively blurred objects, since things can be blurred only if they arevisually represented; but it is not as blurred that they need to be represented.Thirdly, experiences are events whose subjects are conscious persons; and soevery pain experience (or pain feeling) must be had (or experienced, or felt –as the idiom allows) by someone. The injury perceptualist can make all thesepoints without being committed to pains as subjective objects of awareness.

The injury perceptualist can be conciliatory about (PR) too. For onething, pain experiences, as events, are individuated according to their sub-jects, and hence no one else can have (or feel, or experience – as the idiomallows) my pain experiences. For another, if my left foot is hurting by dint ofmy perceiving it as disordered, and if no one else could have been the sub-ject of that perceiving, then that is a sense in which no one else could havefelt that instance of hurting. And none of this commits the injury perceptual-ist to pains as private objects of awareness.

Finally, I return to self-intimation. One way to express that idea is to saythat the items pain experiences represent are guaranteed to grab a subject’sattention. The injury perceptualist cannot say this, but can claim that itmisconstrues a genuine phenomenon, also expressible in terms of attention.

The point requires a distinction between, on the one hand, something’sbeing an object of attention, where this is the notion of an item’s beingperceived, and on the other hand, something’s engaging or occupying theattention, where one’s attention may be engaged by any number of things:thinking about something, perhaps, or perceiving or hallucinating some



object.14 Shifting the focus from the subject-matter of pain experiences tothe experiences themselves, the injury perceptualist can say that onepeculiarity of pain experiences is that they tend to occupy the attention,distracting the subject from other things that might have done so. Again,what is represented by pain experiences is the bodily equivalent of a loudbang: it does not clamour more than anything else for perceptual repre-sentation; but once it gets it (or seems to), the experiences in which it isrepresented tend to engage our attention more fully than other experiences.This goes some way towards capturing the distinctiveness of pain experi-ences, since many ordinary perceptual experiences (one’s experiences ofgreen, for example) are not so automatically engaging. Admittedly, one’stingling sensations are not, either, so the present point applies more to painexperiences than to sensations in general. But that need not worry me, for Iam advancing this attention-engaging feature of pain experiences as asurrogate for the idea of self-intimation, and it is in the pain case specificallythat the injury perceptualist’s opponent is most likely to appeal to self-intimation. The injury perceptualist’s current point vitiates that appeal byoffering the following diagnosis: opponents have mistaken the attention-engaging feature of pain experiences for the self-intimating character oftheir subject-matter.

In short, the injury perceptualist can ‘talk the talk’ of subjectivity, privacy,infallibility and self-intimation.

VI. DISTINCTIVENESS: SOMATOSENSORY SENSES

Even if injury perceptualists can ‘talk the talk’, though, one may worry thattalking the talk is not enough, that there is something genuinely peculiarabout the way in which pain experiences relate to their subject-matter.Moreover, I have yet to deal with the following strand of the distinctivenessproblem: ‘The phenomenal difference between seeing disorder and somato-sensorily feeling it cannot reside in the difference between the experiences’contents, since their contents do not differ – both represent disorder’. Thesetwo strands, interiority and specificity, come together in Descartes’ remark ‘Iam not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, [for ifI were] I would not feel pain when the body was hurt, but would perceivethe damage purely by the intellect, just as a sailor perceives by sight ifanything in his ship is broken’.15 Descartes was right: being in pain is quite

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14 See Peacocke, ‘Conscious Attitudes and Self-Knowledge’, in C. Wright et al. (eds),Knowing Our Own Minds (Oxford UP, ), pp. –.

15 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Cambridge UP, ), p. .

unlike seeing anything – not only the damaged state of one’s ship, but alsothe damaged state of one’s own body. The question is whether the injuryperceptualist can accommodate that fact.

In part, the problem is an instance of the general question of how to givean intentionalist account of the phenomenal differences between the sensemodalities. Intentionalists also have an even more general difficulty, whichFrank Jackson calls ‘finding the feel’: how to explain the phenomenal differ-ences between experiences, on the one hand, and thoughts, on the other.16

Faced with the distinctiveness problem, therefore, the injury perceptualistmight try to adapt strategies intentionalists have used in these othercontexts.

One option, then, is to follow William Lycan and Gilbert Harman in re-stricting the intentionalist account to phenomenal differences within a sensemodality, such as body sense – what Alex Byrne calls ‘intramodal inten-tionalism’.17 For the radical intentionalist, however, this amounts to givingup without a fight. Another option is to agree with Tye (Ten Problems,pp. , ) that whereas visual representations of disorder are conceptual,somatosensory representations are not. But even if I had not (for this paper)forsworn non-conceptual content, it is hard to see how this distinction couldbe what is needed. Why should the imposition of relatively demandingconditions on seeing that one is injured, as against feeling that one is, makethe former painless and the latter painful?

A more promising route for the intentionalist is to distinguish betweenwhat is represented in visual and pain experiences respectively. Challengedto account for the difference between visual and tactual representations ofsquareness, Fred Dretske claims squareness is not tactually represented: it isa ‘proper sensible’ of vision, not a ‘common sensible’ accessible to vision andtouch.18 Likewise, one might argue that being disordered is a proper sensibleof body sense, and hence simply is not visually represented. Alternatively,one might concede that it is, but (following Jackson’s attempt to ‘find thefeel’) insist that, somatosensorily, it is represented in much richer detail.

These strategies are worth pursuing. But I shall recommend a differentidea: that the injury perceptualist can explain the phenomenal differencesbetween feeling disorder and seeing it by focussing not on the referents ofsomatosensory contents, but on their distinctive modes of presentation. Sense,not reference, is what I propose to investigate.



16 F. Jackson, ‘Representation and Experience’, in H. Clapin et al. (eds), Representation in Mind(Westport: Praeger, ).

17 A. Byrne, ‘Intentionalism Defended’, Philosophical Review, (), pp. –, atp. .

18 Dretske, ‘Reply to Lopes’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, (), pp. –, atp. .

Radical intentionalists can elaborate the approach in various ways. Forone thing, they need to decide which item’s mode of presentation to focuson: the represented body part, the represented state of disorder, or therepresented location of such items. I think all three candidates deserveattention. The injury perceptualist could, for example, make use of Bermú-dez’ account of the distinctive spatial content of somatosensory experiences.Bermúdez (pp. –) claims that sensation experiences differ fromexteroceptive experiences in not specifying locations in terms of a singleframe of reference whose axes are centred on an origin constituted by asingle body or body part. Rather they represent locations in terms of a seriesof frames of reference, some nested within others. Hence the injury per-ceptualist could claim that a pain experience’s content specifies the locationof the represented state of disorder first in terms of a frame of referencecentring on, say, the left wrist, the location of that entire frame then beingspecified in terms of another whose origin is the left elbow, and whose ownlocation is in turn specified in terms of yet another, and so on, until thespecification ‘bottoms out’ in a frame centring on the torso. So althoughBermúdez has different aims from mine, his point can be incorporated intoan account of the distinctiveness of pain experiences. For my part, however,I shall focus not on pain experiences’ spatial content, but on other peculiaraspects of their modes of presentation of body parts. In what follows, Iidentify two.

VI.. Being aware that the object of experience is oneself

How should I elaborate my proposal that body parts are somatosensorilyrepresented under distinctive modes of presentation? One point of depart-ure is the recent idea that in bodily awareness, unlike exteroceptive percep-tion, subjects are aware of their own bodies not only as material objects, butalso as themselves, or as conscious subjects. Against this, there stands avenerable tradition, running through Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer and Witt-genstein, that the self is systematically elusive: one is never aware of oneselfas both a material object and a subject. But this tradition has recently beenopposed, by, for example, Ayers, Bermúdez, Brewer and Cassam, and op-posed partly on the basis that whatever we say about other modes ofperception, body sense is not eluded by the self.19 The idea needs sharpen-ing; but, on its face, might it be just what the injury perceptualist needs?

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19 M.R. Ayers, Locke (London: Routledge, ), Vol. , pp. –; Bermúdez, chs –; B.Brewer, ‘Bodily Awareness and the Self’, in Bermúdez et al. (eds), The Body and the Self (MITPress, ), pp. –; Q. Cassam, ‘Inner Sense, Body Sense, and the Refutation ofIdealism’, European Journal of Philosophy, (), pp. –, Self and World (Oxford UP, ),and ‘Introspection and Bodily Self-Ascription’, in Bermúdez et al. (eds), pp. –. On theelusiveness thesis, see Cassam, Self and World, ch. .

There are two problems with thinking so. First, almost all who deny thatthe self eludes bodily awareness use a mentalist argument. Bill Brewer, forexample, argues (p. ) that in sensation we are aware of mental properties,that their mentality means that they are ‘properties of the body that are alsonecessarily properties of the basic subject of that very awareness’, and thatthis provides a sense in which having a sensation involves awareness of one’sbodily self as a subject.20 Having rejected mentalism, however, the injuryperceptualist cannot say this. By contrast, one of Quassim Cassam’s argu-ments is promisingly non-mentalist. But here a second problem arises:Cassam’s argument concludes that the self does not elude visual experienceseither. And if that is right, then the desired contrast between body sense andvision is lost.

These are the right tracks to be on; but I need a point that is non-mentalist and yet preserves the contrast between somatosensory and visualexperiences. To that end, I shall start with Cassam’s argument that the selfeludes neither body sense nor vision, that in both perceptual modalities oneis aware of oneself as a subject.

Cassam illuminates experiential modes of presentation by adverting tothe judgements which the experiences ground. By saying that in both bodysense and vision one is aware of oneself as a subject, he means that bothsomatosensory and visual experiences ground a special sort of first-personjudgement, namely, judgements that are ‘immune to error throughmisidentification relative to the first person’ (Self and World, pp. –). Anexample of such an ‘FP-immune judgement’ is ‘My legs are crossed’, basedon the subject’s somatosensory experience. To say it is FP-immune is to saythat it cannot be mistaken in the following way: though the thinker knowson that basis that someone’s legs are crossed, he is mistaken in judging thatit is his legs that are crossed. That is impossible, because when one gainsknowledge somatosensorily (as opposed to visually) that someone’s legs arecrossed, one does so precisely by gaining knowledge that one’s own legsare crossed. Hence it would be unintelligible in the somatosensory case (butnot the visual case) for me to wonder ‘Someone’s legs are crossed, but arethey my legs?’. (That is not quite right, for we can imagine a case in whichA’s brain is wired to B’s body, causing A to make the false somatosensorilybased judgement that it is his own legs that are crossed. But in that case wecan deny that A knew that someone’s legs were crossed.21 Moreover, even ifit is someone else’s legs A experiences somatosensorily, he experiences themas his own.) For my purpose, the principal point is straightforward: when



20 See also Brewer, pp. , ; Ayers, Vol. , p. ; Cassam, ‘Inner Sense’, pp. –,‘Introspection’, p. , and Self and World, pp. , .

21 See Evans, pp. –, ; Cassam, Self and World, pp. –.

one is somatosensorily aware of one’s own legs, one experiences themas one’s own.

The problem, though, is that Cassam’s point about FP-immunity cannotby itself capture the distinctiveness of somatosensory experiences. For herightly extends it to a certain class of visually based judgements. The spatialcontent of visual experiences is egocentric: their objects are presented asstanding in spatial relations to their subjects. You see Nelson’s Column as infront of yourself, for example. Correlatively, when looking at the column,even though you do not straightforwardly see yourself, there is a sense inwhich you are visually aware of yourself. And, crucially, judgements such as‘I am standing in front of Nelson’s Column’, based on this curious species ofvisual self-awareness, are also FP-immune. Hence in visual experience tooone is aware of oneself as a subject.

I need not be side-tracked by the question exercising Cassam whetherFP-immunity is the way to explain the notions of experiencing yourself oryour body as yourself or as a subject or as your own. For my purposes, I can useall three phrases simply to mean ‘experiencing yourself (or your body) in away that grounds FP-immune judgements’. Because what is important hereis the FP-immunity, not the concepts Cassam uses it to illuminate. Theproblem is that both visual and somatosensory experiences ground FP-immune judgements; hence the sought-after contrast between these experi-ences remains elusive.

Nevertheless I think there is a contrast: only in somatosensory experi-ences is it manifest that the object of one’s experience is, or is a part of, oneself.A somatosensory experience that has this feature can be contrasted with twovisual experiences that lack it: in the first case, because the object of one’sexperience is neither oneself nor a part of oneself; in the second, because it isnot manifest that it is. So my examples have this structure:

A.Seeing Nelson’s B.Seeing your C. Somatosensorily Column own foot in perceiving your

a jacuzzi own foot

Are you aware of yourselfas yourself ? yes (p) yes (r, not q) yes (t )

Are you the object of your experience? no yes (r) yes (u)

Is it manifest that you are theobject of your experience? no no yes (s)

In case A, seeing Nelson’s Column, you are aware of yourself as a subject,since your visual experience grounds the FP-immune judgement p ‘I amstanding in front of Nelson’s Column’. But, crucially, you are not the object

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of your visual experience. You do not straightforwardly see yourself, thoughyou are visually aware of yourself. Though you are in the wings of thescene, you are not on the stage.22 What is on the stage – the object of yourexperience – is Nelson’s Column. That, in other words, is the object aboutwhich your experience enables you to make perceptual–demonstrativejudgements. So this is one difference between case A and the somatosensorycase C, in which you are the object of your experience.

In case B, you are sitting in a bubbling jacuzzi, and you see what is in factyour left foot sticking out above the bubbles. First, a caveat : it is tempting todescribe this as the converse of case A, to say that though you now are theobject of your visual experience, you are no longer aware of yourself as itssubject. And that in turn makes it tempting to say that what is distinctiveabout the somatosensory case is simply that both phenomena are present:you are both the object of the experience and aware of yourself as itssubject. But this is too quick. For in case B, just as in A, you are aware ofyourself as the experience’s subject; again some visually based self-ascriptions in B will be FP-immune. Admittedly, many will not be: havingjudged q ‘My left foot is muddy’, for example, you might go on intelligibly towonder ‘Someone’s left foot is muddy, but is it mine?’. But the judgement r‘My head is above that foot’, made on the basis of looking down at yourfoot, is FP-immune. So in case B you are both the object of the experienceand aware of yourself as its subject. What, then, is the difference betweenthis and the way you, or your body part, is presented in the pain case C?

A crucial difference between B and C is that in case C it is manifest thatthe object of your experience is you (or a part of you). In case B, that is notmanifest. In the jacuzzi case, the judgement s ‘That left foot is my left foot’ isvisually based and not FP-immune: one might wonder ‘That foot is some-one’s left foot, but is it my left foot?’. But in the pain case, it is FP-immune,based on an experience in which it is manifest that the object of awareness isa part of you as such. After all, the judgement is an identity claim, on oneside of which your left foot is identified demonstratively (meaning that a partof you is the object of your experience), and on the other side of which it isidentified via an FP-immune occurrence of the first-person (meaning that itis as a part of you that it is the object of your experience).

So not only does your somatosensory experience ground the FP-immunejudgement t ‘My left foot is disordered’, but it grounds the perceptual–demonstrative judgement u ‘That left foot is disordered’ (which sets it apartfrom the first visual case), and, crucially, the FP-immune and demonstrative



22 The metaphor is Brewer’s: ‘Self-Location and Agency’, Mind, (), pp. –, atp. . Evans (pp. –), J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Hough-ton Mifflin, ), p. , and perhaps Cassam too, miss this distinction.

judgement of identity s ‘That left foot is my left foot’ (which sets it apartfrom both visual cases). So here at last is a representational differencebetween visual and somatosensory representations of one’s own body.

Moreover, though I have been engaging the second strand of thedistinctiveness problem, what I have said is also relevant to the first. For oneof my glosses on ‘the interiority intuition’ was that the relationship betweensensation experiences and their subject-matter is more intimate than therelationship between visual experiences and theirs. The current suggestion isthat when one is in pain, one somatosensorily represents oneself. And I havenow shown that somatosensorily representing oneself is not merely a matterof one’s having a sense of oneself in the wings of the scene (case A), normerely of one’s being the object of one’s own awareness (case B); rather, it isa matter of the object of one’s experience being manifestly oneself (case C).Without this, having a pain experience would indeed be like beingDescartes’ sailor in a ship, as is seeing your own disordered limb. But,understood properly, a pain experience involves being confronted with whatis manifestly a disordered part of yourself.

VI.. Martin and the sense of ownership of one’s body

Michael Martin describes a related contrast between somatosensory andordinary perceptual experiences.23 Unlike Cassam, he speaks of a subject’ssomatosensory experience presenting his body as his body, rather than ashimself or as a subject. But again what concerns us are the terms used toexplain these notions, not the unpacked notions themselves. So what doesMartin mean in claiming that when a subject is somatosensorily aware of abody part, he is aware of it as a part of his own body, whereas when he seesit or touches it he is not?

Somatosensory and visual experiences give us a sense of the boundaries ofour own bodies. What Martin thinks is distinctive about somatosensoryexperiences is the way they present that boundary. They present it as a limitto the region of which the subject can have somatosensory awareness, aregion enclosed within a larger space of whose remainder he cannot beaware in that way. So when a subject has a sensation in his arm, he is awareof it (or, as the injury perceptualist will prefer, he is aware of the experi-ence’s subject-matter) as internal, in the sense that it is experienced as beingwithin a region in which he has somatosensory awareness, that regionbeing presented as set against a larger space in which he does not.24 By

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23 M. Martin, ‘Bodily Awareness: a Sense of Ownership’, in Bermúdez et al. (eds), The Bodyand the Self, pp. –, at pp. –, and ‘Sense Modalities and Spatial Properties’, in N.Eilan et al. (eds), Spatial Representation (Oxford: Blackwell, ), pp. –, at pp. –.

24 Martin, ‘Sense Modalities’, p. ; ‘Sight and Touch’, in T. Crane (ed.), The Contents ofExperience (Cambridge UP, ), pp. –, at pp. , –.

contrast, when he sees the boundary of his own body, this involves his seeingboth the body and what is beyond it. He does not see his body as set against aspace of which he can have no visual awareness. And the same point goesfor touch (‘Sense Modalities’, p. ). So he does not see or tactually feel hisbody as being his own in Martin’s sense. Rather, in vision and touch, he canat best identify it as his own from amongst the other potential objects of hisawareness (pp. , ; ‘Sight and Touch’, p. ). And here Martin’saccount makes contact with mine: for the identification in the visual casebrings with it the possibility of misidentification, thus preventing the visuallybased judgement ‘This is a part of my body’ from being FP-immune.

So in this way too the injury perceptualist can explain a sense in whichthe subject-matter of pain experiences is presented as ‘inner’. When in pain,I experience disorder as located within a boundary of whose exterior I canhave no similar awareness; I am aware that a part of my body – not just ofthat body – is disordered. So again pain experiences represent one’s ownbody in a way in which exteroceptive perceptual experiences never do.

If this section is right, then it is a ‘projective error’ to think that thedistinctiveness of pain experiences requires them to represent items that aremental, subjective, self-intimating, infallibly accessible or private. It involvestrying to explain at the level of reference (the items of which painexperiences constitute awareness) peculiarities that in fact belong at the levelof sense. Given this, and my attempts both to explain mentalistic idioms andto ‘talk the talk’ of interiority, intentionalism remains a live option, and forthe conceptualist as well as the non-conceptualist. We can, in other words,stand the tradition on its head: rather than modelling perceptualexperiences on pains, blankly conceived, we can take pain experiences to bea special kind of perceptual experience, intentionally conceived.25

University of Bristol



25 For comments and discussion, I am very grateful to Carol Bain, George Bain, BillBrewer, Bill Child, John Hyman, Neil Manson, anonymous referees, and audiences at theUniversities of Bristol, Cambridge, Keele, Nottingham, St Andrews, Stirling and York.

intentionalism and pain

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