I Introduction

Let's assume there are psychological generalizations that the folk rely upon in explaining and predicting the behavior of their fellows. Let's further assume these generalizations are intentional, in that they do their explanatory and predictive work by attributing to the subjects in their domain intentional mental states such as beliefs, desires, and the like. Then we can define a broad intentional psychology as one that adverts only to broad, viz. purely denotational/ truth-conditional, mental contents in its generalizations; so the sentences expressing its generalizations should be read transparently. A narrow psychology is one that is not so restricted. Accordingly, sentences expressing narrow generalizations will contain opaque contexts, indicated by ‘that’ -clauses ('believes that…,’ ‘desires that … ,’ and the like). Here is an example of the sort of generalization we have in mind:

The International Association for the Study of Pain’s (IASP) definition of “pain” defines it as a subjective experience. The Note accompanying the definition emphasizes that, as such, pains are not to be identified with objective conditions of body parts (such as actual or potential tissue damage). Nevertheless, it goes on to state that a pain “is unquestionably a sensation in a part or parts of the body, but it is also always unpleasant and therefore also an emotional experience.” This generates a puzzle that philosophers have been well familiar with: how to understand our utterances and judgments attributing pain to body parts. (The puzzle is, of course, general extending to all sensations routinely located in body parts.) This work tackles this puzzle. I go over various options specifying the truth-conditions for pain-attributing judgments and, at the end, make my own recommendation which is an adverbialist, qualia-friendly proposal with completely naturalistic credentials that is also compatible with forms of weak intentionalism. The results are generalizable to other bodily sensations and can be used to illustrate, quite generally, the viability of a qualia-friendly adverbialist (but naturalist and weakly intentionalist) account of perception.

This paper is an attempt to spell out what makes the scientific study of pain so distinctive from a philosophical perspective. Using the IASP definition of ‘pain’ (1986) as our guide, we raise a number of questions about the philosophical assumptions underlying the scientific study of pain. We argue that unlike the study of ordinary perception, the study of pain focuses from the very start on the experience itself and its qualities, without making deep assumptions about whether pain experiences are perceptual. This in turn puts scientific explanation in a curious position due to pain's inherently subjective epistemic nature. The reason for this focus on the experience itself and its qualities, we argue, has to do with pain's complex phenomenology involving an affective/motivational dimension. We argue for the scientific legitimacy of first-person phenomenological studies and attempts to correlate phenomenology with neural events. We argue that this methodological procedure is inevitable and has no anti-physicalist ontological implications when properly understood. We end the paper by commenting on a discussion between two prominent pain scientists in the field, Don Price and Howard Fields, about the need to distinguish more dimensions in the phenomenology of pain and how to classify them vis-à-vis the recent scientific findings. Our interest in this discussion is not only to introduce some clarifications but also to show how “neurophenomenology” has already been shaping the scientific research and to back our claim about why this methodology is inevitable with an example.

I criticize Rolls's account of what makes emotional states conscious.

Three major attempts by Barsalou to specify what makes a perceptual symbol perceptual fail. One way to give such an account is to use symbols' causal/nomic relation to what they represent, roughly the way contemporary informational psychosemanticists develop their theories, but this fails to draw the distinction Barsalou seems to have in mind.

We argue that Block's charge of fallacy remains ungrounded so long as the existence of P-consciousness, as Block construes it, is independently established. This, in turn, depends on establishing the existence of “phenomenal properties” that are essentially not representational, cognitive, or functional. We argue that Block leaves this fundamental thesis unsubstantiated. We conclude by suggesting that phenomenal consciousness can be accounted for in terms of a hybrid set of representational and functional properties.