Here is something everybody should agree on: there are no unfelt pains.
The obviousness and clarity of this strongly suggests:
- Pain is the very same concept as awareness of pain.
But if (1) is true, then we should be able to put “awareness of pain” wherever we have “pain”. Thus:
- Awareness of pain is the very same concept as awareness of awareness of pain.
And we can repeat the substitution:
- Awareness of awareness of pain is the very same concept as awareness of awareness of awareness of pain.
This leads to an endless regress. I won’t worry about that. Instead, I will worry about the fact that from 1–3, the following follows:
- Anyone who is in pain is aware of awareness of awareness of awareness of pain.
But 4 is empirically false. It is especially false in the case of intense pains that are so overwhelming as to make the multiple levels of awareness in 4 impossible.
So, we should reject 1. How, then, do we explain why there are no unfelt pains?
I think the answer is to say that “x feels a pain” or “x is aware of a pain” can be understood in two ways:
x is aware of their state of paining
x is paining.
I think that in ordinary usage of “feels a pain”, 6 is the right understanding even if 5 is a more literalistic translation. Given that to be aware of a pain just is to pain, it’s trivial that there are no unfelt pains, since anyone who is in pain is paining just as anybody who is engaged in a dance is dancing.
(If instead we opted for the unordinary sense of 5, then it would be false that everyone who is in pain feels a pain, since one might have the first-order pain without the second-order awareness of that pain.)
So far this sounds like the familiar adverbial theory of perception. But I don’t like the adverbial theory of perception. After all, to feel is to be aware, and to be aware is to be aware of something. What is one aware of when one is feeling pain? The natural answer is that one is aware of pain. But that gets us back to 1–4.
So if it’s not pain we are aware of, and yet we don’t want pure adverbialism for pain, what are we aware of? Thomas Reid noticed that we have a word for the hardness of a physical object, namely “hardness”, but not one for the corresponding phenomenal state. In the case of pain, it seems to me we have the opposite predicament: we have a word for the mental act of sensing, namely “pain”, but no word for the property that the act of sensing represents. (Reid's account here is that pain is a mere sensation, without anything represented, but I don't like that.)
But we have a word that comes pretty close. Anyone who feels pain feels unwell. And to feel unwell is to sense (one’s) unwellness (in a non-factive sense of “to sense”). So to feel pain is to sense a particular kind of unwellness (there are other kinds of unwellness, like the ones sensed in nausea or itching). We don’t have a word for that particular kind of unwellness, though we can describe it as the kind of unwellness that is properly sensed in pain. (By the way, the word for the genus of sensations of unwellness seems to be “discomfort”. Every pain is a discomfort, but nausea and itching are discomforts that aren’t pains.)
