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Not Only a Messenger: Towards an Attitudinal‐Representational Theory of Pain
Author(s) -
Jacobson Hilla
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
philosophy and phenomenological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1933-1592
pISSN - 0031-8205
DOI - 10.1111/phpr.12493
Subject(s) - argument (complex analysis) , psychology , extant taxon , salient , character (mathematics) , quality (philosophy) , cognitive psychology , epistemology , philosophy , medicine , computer science , artificial intelligence , geometry , mathematics , evolutionary biology , biology
The main goal of this paper is to present a theory of the most salient aspect of the phenomenal character of pain – namely, the painfulness of pain or its negative affective quality. This task involves developing an account of the evaluative structure of pain, according to which painfulness is constituted by a (subjectively) frustrated (first‐order) conative attitude that is directed towards the bodily condition the obtaining of which the pain represents. The argument for the proposed Attitudinal‐Representational Theory of Pain proceeds by presenting an explanatory challenge that concerns crucial aspects of the reason‐giving force of pain, and showing that, unlike extant theories of pain, it successfully accounts for them.