The Problem of Pain

When my wife was pregnant, our birthing coach asked the class " What is pain? " I thought I might finally get to display some of my philosophical training, but alas, the correct answer was: " Pain is whatever she says it is. " The coach's " sufferercentric " definition echoes the one offered by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP)— " Pain is always subjective " —as well as the definition of pain offered by the philosopher Saul Kripke in his argument against identity theory— " Pain. .. is picked out by the property of being pain itself, by its immediate phenomenological quality " (1972/1980, p. 152). These subjective conceptions of pain pose problems for the scientific study of pain, as Price and Aydede point out in the introduction of their chapter. If the essence of pain is its phenomenological quality, then it seems the only way to study it directly is through introspection and subjects' verbal reports on their conscious experience, but this is often considered to be an unverifiable and unreliable method. Conversely, indirect information about the objective properties associated with pain experiences seems inadequate to fully explain the essential phenomenological quality of pain. The problem, which generalizes to other conscious experiences, is that any materialist theory that attempts to explain subjective experiences in terms of objective properties seems doomed to leave out the very essence of what it is trying to explain—for example, the feeling of pain. And any nonmaterialist theory seems doomed to be unsci-entific. What I will call the " problem of pain " has us taking a materialist approach to the study of pain while conceiving of pain in a way suggestive of metaphysical dualism. 1 The first step in responding to the problem of pain is to recognize the possibility of epistemological dualism. As Price and Aydede explain this idea, certain complex neural processes can be accessed in two fundamentally different ways: first, conscious agents in whom the processes occur can introspect on them, and second, other agents (often with the aid of scientific instruments) can observe the processes as well as their