Pain and Touch

The Monist 100 (4):465-477 (2017)
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Abstract

When one contrasts pain with the classic five senses, discussions generally focus on vision, which is taken as the paradigmatic example of perception. An intentionalist might argue that if the phenomenal difference between feeling and seeing bodily disturbances cannot be explained at the level of the content, it can be so at the level of the mode of presentation, and more particularly at the level of the structure of the spatial phenomenology of pain. Here I will argue that the spatial phenomenology of pain shares some key features with touch by contrast to sight, but these similarities should not make us neglect major differences between these two types of bodily sensations. I shall then draw the consequences of these differences for the awareness of one’s body as one’s own. In brief, to fix the boundaries of the body that one experiences as one’s own, one must answer two questions: where does the body stop, and the rest of world start? and what matters for self-preservation? I will suggest that touch primarily answers the first question, whereas pain primarily answers the second question.

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Author's Profile

Frédérique de Vignemont
Institut Jean Nicod

Citations of this work

Is there a tactile field?Błażej Skrzypulec - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 35 (3):301-326.
Spatial content of painful sensations.Błażej Skrzypulec - 2021 - Mind and Language 36 (4):554-569.
Blur and interoceptive vision.Błażej Skrzypulec - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (10):3271-3289.

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References found in this work

An Inquiry Into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense.Thomas Reid - 1997 - Cambridge University Press. Edited by Elizabeth Schmidt Radcliffe, Richard McCarty, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya.
Self-knowledge and "inner sense": Lecture I: The object perception model.Sydney Shoemaker - 1994 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (2):249-269.
An inquiry into the human mind on the principles of common sense.Thomas Reid - 2007 - In Elizabeth Schmidt Radcliffe, Richard McCarty, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya, Late modern philosophy: essential readings with commentary. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Sight and touch.Michael Martin - 1992 - In Tim Crane, The Contents of Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Intentionalism and pain.D. T. Bain - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (213):502-523.

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