If it itches, scratch!

Abstract

Many bodily sensations are connected quite closely with specific actions: itches with scratching, for example, and hunger with eating. Indeed, these connections have the feel of conceptual connections. With the exception of D. M. Armstrong, philosophers have largely neglected this aspect of bodily sensations. In this paper, I propose a theory of bodily sensations that explains these connections. The theory ascribes intentional content to bodily sensations but not, strictly speaking, representational content. Rather, the content of these sensations is an imperative: in the case of itches, ‘Scratch!’ The view avoids non-intentional qualia and hence accords with what could be called, generalizing Lycan slightly, the ‘hegemony of intentionality’.

Notes

¹How can a sensory experience have an imperative mood or force? Although possible answers come to mind (perhaps mentalese, or more particularly sensory-ese, contains explicit indicators of imperativeness, or perhaps the functional role of the message—where it's from, where it goes, how it's operated on—constitutes its imperativeness), this is a topic for another paper, since it is a general problem for any intentional view of experience. How, after all, does a ‘descriptive’ representation, say from vision, gets its indicative mood and its declarative or assertive force?

²In a recent article that I am otherwise much in agreement with, Colin Klein [2007] argues that pains have only imperative content.

³I would like to thank the Philosophy Program of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University for its warm hospitality during 2003–4 when the penultimate version of this paper was completed. I would also like to thank David Sanford and James A. Womack for helpful comments on other versions of this paper.