Pain as a concept in philosophy

Abstract

Like any other sensation, pain does not include criteria for verifying its credibility. To construe it by the language of physical science means to ignore many other substantial constraints complicating knowledge of pain. Such kind of description model would be reductive and incomplete regarding the full range of other sense impressions. Moreover, individual self-reports about someone’s pain sensations have to base on the noncontradictory concepts, and concept networks, with which they become accessible for understanding by those who do not actually feel pain. If structured by physicalist-like patterns, such a quantification of pains is open to serious gaps in the practices of medical diagnosis. Analyses of traumatic nonsomatic aches demonstrate that the tenets of semantics are not pretty good to determine the prolonged pain experience to be comprehended. Clarifying pains sheds light on the opposition between representationist and reductionist approaches to pain explanation. The starting point in this long way is to suppose a distinction between transitive and intransitive sensations, on the one hand, and between transitive and intransitive psychological verbs, on the other hand. It has principal importance for clarification and a further solution the problem of pain recognition. The backbone of this method, which is limited to a series of empirical exceptions as well, is to combine linguistic pragmatics (Ludwig Wittgenstein) with a sort of materialism (John Smart) and criticism of the hardcore physicalism from a functional standpoint (Hillary Putnam). What pain is not restricted to awareness of pain only but implies a state of mind’s activity as well, stems from the well-known Cartesian argument of dreaming. This article considers the ambiguity of pain, which makes it impossible to be understood it as the simplest feeling we have. Theoretic reconstruction the above-mentioned interpretations allows finding the perspective, from which pain might be described in terms of a complex concept covering a wide range of con-conceptual experiences. This gives reason to conclude that propositions about pain demonstrate that the internal relation in them between conceptual and non-conceptual affirms its irreversibility.