According to standard philosophical and clinical understandings, pain is an essentially mental phenomenon (typically, a kind of conscious experience). In a challenge to this standard conception, a recent burst of empirical work in experimental philosophy, such as that by Justin Sytsma and Kevin Reuter, purports to show that people ordinarily conceive of pain as an essentially bodily phenomenon—specifically, a quality of bodily disturbance. In response to this bodily view, other recent experimental studies have provided evidence that the ordinary (‘folk’) concept (...) of pain is more complex than previously assumed: rather than tracking only bodily or only mental aspects of pain, the ordinary concept of pain can actually track either of these aspects. The polyeidic (or ‘many ideas’) analysis of the folk concept of pain, as proposed by Emma Borg et al., captures this complexity. Whereas previous empirical support for the polyeidic view has focused on the context-sensitivity of the folk concept of pain, here we discuss individual differences in people’s ‘pain priors’—namely, their standing tendencies to think of pain in relatively mind-centric or body-centric ways. We describe a preliminary empirical study and present a small number of findings, which will be explored further in future work. The results we discuss are part of a larger programme of work which seeks to integrate philosophical pain research into clinical practice. For example, we hypothesise that variations in how patients with chronic pain are thinking about pain could help predict their responses to treatment. (shrink)

This paper considers one aspect of the relationship between language and thought, focusing on a theory proposed by José Luis Bermúdez. Bermúdez argues that language is required for any kinds of thinking that involve thinking about thoughts, or what he calls 'intentional ascent'. I argue, to the contrary, that Bermúdez gives us no reason to suppose language is necessary for all instances of thinking about thoughts. Whilst I am broadly sympathetic to supra-communicative approaches to language, I seek to deny Bermúdez’s (...) particular thesis; I do so by showing that alternative representational formats, specifically maps, could play qualitatively the same role that language is supposed to play in his account of thinking about thoughts. (shrink)