Session 7: Pain in Question

1st Global Conference

Wednesday 17th February – Friday 19th February 2010
The Women’s College, Sydney, Australia

in association with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Who is Able to Fell Pain? A Cartesian Attack on the Bete-machine
Anik Waldow
Department of Philosophy, SOPHI, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

Many philosophers deny that animals can feel pain, because in order to do so, they argue, animals would need to share our concept of pain, which they obviously do not: someone is taken to share our concept of pain only if she refers to her pain experiences and that of others in the same way as we do. On the face of it, this argument looks counterintuitive. Is the capacity for pain not a matter of how our bodies are designed rather than a matter of how we use language? Do we not need to look at a creature’s nervous system instead of its conceptual capacity to determine what it can and cannot sense? In this essay I will defend these intuitions by showing that the need to discriminate real pain from hallucinated pain clearly refers us to the body as the material basis of pain.

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The Ambiguity of Pain
Sascha Fink
Institute for Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, Germany

Pain is a paradigmatic mental state; all major questions in the philosophy of mind can be related to pain (Putnam1967). Pain can also be seen as a paradigmatic case study for a science of consciousness (Ayede & Güzeldere 2002), as it is a) a simple phenomenal state compared to others like color vision, b) widely distributed amongst humans and non-human animals, and c) technically and pharmacologically manipulable. Yet the debate on the definition of “pain” (and the metaphysical status of “pain”) exposes the ambiguity of the term: in natural language, “pain” denotes a cluttered mixture of distinguishable concepts – a perception, a behavioral reaction, a body state, a negative evalutation, a motivator, an alarm signal and so on – and none of the properties of each of these concepts is necessary for applying the everyday concept “pain” felicitously. The meaning of our everyday concept “pain” is muddled, which influences pain science as much as pain treatment. Thus reducing our everyday notion to a scientific concept “pain” fails, and therefore, the conceptual work in pain science must follow a different route, namely explication, as I argue here. Against Carnap’s initial intuition (1959) – that explication is a reconstruction of an everyday concept in the terms of natural science – I will argue that in pain science, the driving (however neglected) force in the analysis of the concept of “pain” can be found in phenomenology which provides the important distinction between feeling pain and being in pain (Grahek 2007). I will put the case for a bilateral explication process, in which cognitive neuroscience and phenomenological approaches interact to map exhaustively the field of inquiry for pain science. In conclusion, I further argue that it is not the state of pain that is ethically relevant, but only the state of suffering: the pleasure we get from eating spicy food is an example of an enjoyable pain. If we switch from the purely theoretical question to the moral question – admitting that we should care about the pain of others -I argue that pain without suffering has no moral significance. This conclusion has implications for our ethical attitude towards the suffering of non-human animals, of comatose patients and of demented elderly and children.

Suffering from a Psychiatric Disorder: Interpreting Psychological Pain for Meaning and Re-authoring
Jean-Francois Pelletier
Yale University School of Medicine, Program for Recovery & Community Health, USA

Since Antiquity, what many now call mental illness has been given many different names and has been studied from as many different theoretical perspectives. From melancholy to madness, from psychiatric disorders to mental health problems, for instance, such conditions were generally associated with stigma and social exclusion for those afflicted. A sense of guilt and uselessness is also part of this burden, from which suicide is too often seen as the only way to get some kind of a relief.

Nowadays, despite a very pessimistic prognosis forecasting a life-long deteriorating process – the Kraepelian theory of schizophrenia – we know that recovery from serious mental illness is very much possible. In the literature on recovery in mental health, finding meaning and a purpose in life is a key for hope of a better future and of a fulfilling life. That may explain why spirituality is a theme so often addressed in the narratives of mental health service-users when they talk or write about themselves and about their struggles to overcome suffering and despair. Finding meaning is also a way to take control, to re-write a personal history and to restore dignity with self-agency.

Using hermeneutics as a re-interpretation procedure, this presentation explores how to draw an exegesis to discover the meaning from qualitative stories of mental illness and recovery. On one hand, to find and express meaning about their own suffering and psychological pain might be a way for individuals experiencing a first episode of psychosis to re-author their personal narratives. On the other hand, this time from a more collective point of view, when applied to the lived experience of mental distress hermeneutics may have deeply political implications. This paper explores such implications; 1) at the individual level, and 2) at a political level.