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Thesis

You cannot be mistaken about whether you are in pain

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ConsciousnessAnalyticModern EuropeanLudwig WittgensteinSaul KripkeDaniel DennettRené Descartes#incorrigibility#introspection#pain#self-knowledge
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Its coordinates: 1.3 Philosophy of Mind · 1.3.1 The Mind–Body Problem · 1.3.3 Intentionality +1 more

Where it stands

Tonight's motion is about the one kind of knowledge that seems immune to today's question of the day.

Motion: You cannot be mistaken about whether you are in pain.

For: with pain there is no gap between how things seem and how they are. A pain that seems to hurt is a pain. Kripke made a related point in Naming and Necessity: we pick out pain by the way it feels, not by some outward mark that might come apart from it. Wittgenstein went further. In the Philosophical Investigations (§246) he says it cannot be said of me at all, except perhaps as a joke, that I know I am in pain. Knowing needs room for error, and there is none here.

Against: people seem to make such mistakes. Someone braced for a burn and touched with ice may cry out, then say a moment later that it was only cold. Patients describe pain in limbs they no longer have. Some philosophers, Dennett among them, doubt that introspection gives us any special authority over our own experience.

Points to settle: is the phantom-limb case a mistake about the pain, or only about where it is? And when someone says "it was cold, not pain", were they wrong a moment ago, or are they wrong now?

Please mark your side.

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5 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Nirmala Jayasekara

    For Fellow

    For, with a distinction from the Abhidhamma. Feeling, vedanā, is said to be known directly as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. What we add almost instantly is a story: "this is pain, it is getting worse, it means danger". Meditators learn to see the gap between the two.

    So Elif's patients were not wrong about the unpleasant feeling. They were wrong about the story they told around it. On that view the motion is true of the feeling and false of the concept "pain", which carries the story with it.

  2. Oskar Nyberg

    For Fellow

    For, but as a point about grammar rather than certainty. Wittgenstein's claim is not that we have perfect inner vision. It is that "I'm in pain" is not a report from an inner observer at all; it is more like a cry, trained into words. Alistair's patients are concealing or exaggerating, which are ways of using a cry, not errors of observation.

    Whether Elif's anxious patients fit that picture I genuinely don't know. They may be the best case against.

Against the thesis 3

  1. Elif Yıldız

    Against Fellow

    Against. In our perception course we read about the thermal grill: interleaved warm and cool bars, neither painful on its own, which many people feel as burning. Most researchers would say that is a real pain produced by an illusion. Fine, that's for the motion.

    But we also discussed patients with anxiety who report crushing chest pain and later, after reassurance and calm, describe the same episode as "tightness, fear, not really pain". At least one of their reports is wrong. Either they were mistaken then or they are mistaken now.

  2. Alistair Gow

    Against Fellow

    Against, from the surgery. A great many patients said "it doesn't hurt" while gripping the chair arm, and a few said "it's agony" while chatting happily. Some of that is reporting rather than experiencing. But after thirty-four years I'm not sure the line is as clean as Nirmala's, and doctors who treated reports as infallible made worse decisions than doctors who didn't.

  3. Teodora Vasileva

    Against Reader

    Against, from the recovery room.

    The commonest thing I heard after surgery was a patient saying "it doesn't hurt", then wincing as soon as he moved, then saying "well, it hurts when I move". He wasn't lying. He was answering about the moment while braced not to move.

    Children are the clearest case. A frightened child having a dressing changed will scream at the touch of a cotton swab and laugh a minute later when distracted. Was the scream a mistake about pain? I don't think the motion survives cases like this intact.

    What survives is something narrower and very important: when someone sincerely reports pain, we have no better witness to treat. That is a rule of clinical respect, and a good one. It is not a proof that the witness cannot be wrong.