Strong representationalism and bodily sensations: Reliable causal covariance and biological function

ABSTRACT

Bodily sensations, such as pain, hunger, itches, or sexual feelings, are commonly characterized in terms of their phenomenal character. In order to account for this phenomenal character, many philosophers adopt strong representationalism. According to this view, bodily sensations are essentially and entirely determined by an intentional content related to particular conditions of the body. For example, pain would be nothing more than the representation of actual or potential tissue damage. In order to motivate and justify their view, strong representationalists often appeal to the reliable causal covariance between bodily sensations and certain kinds of bodily conditions or to the corresponding biological function that these bodily sensations are supposed to fulfill. In this paper, I argue on the basis of recent empirical research that arguments from reliable causal covariance and biological function cannot motivate the introduction of corresponding intentional content. In particular, I argue that bodily sensations are caused by a heterogeneous class of physiological and psychological factors and their biological functions are too diverse to be reduced to the representation of a particular bodily condition. Responses are available to strong representationalists, but they either require substantial alterations to their core assumptions or incur a significant empirical burden.

KEYWORDS:

• Pain
• itch
• hunger
• sexual feelings
• better-safe-than-sorry
• strong intentionalism
• imperativism
• representationalism
• muscle pain
• visceral pain

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Peter Clutton, Frances Egan, Rebekka Hufendiek, Colin Klein, Matej Kohár, Beate Krickel, Francesco Marchi, Judith Martens, Albert Newen, Thomas Park, Alfredo Vernazzani, Pascale Willemsen, and Julia Wolf for their feedback on different versions of the paper and related talks. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The assumptions outlined in the previous paragraph are common to strong representationalism and strong imperativism. Both are grouped together as versions of strong intentionalism. The paper focuses primarily on the strong representationalist view. Strong imperativism will be briefly discussed in Section 5.

2. Strong representationalists do not provide an unequivocal condition indicating how strong the causal covariance must be between a certain bodily sensation and a certain bodily condition in order to motivate the introduction of a corresponding intentional content. In this paper, I assume that the required reliability must be relatively strong in order to provide a convincing argument in favor of strong representationalism. Accordingly, misrepresentations are supposed to be rare exceptions. This strong criterion corresponds to some of those works that have had a lasting effect on the intuitions underlying representationalist theories (e.g., Pitcher, 1970), while it might seem too demanding to other authors relying on arguments of causal covariance (e.g., Hill, 2017). As already mentioned, the problem is that it is not clearly determined what it means that, for example, pain under normal circumstances occurs together with tissue damage. Thus, the obligation to argue for an alternative criterion lies with strong representationalists, especially as the assignment of a clear cutoff for reliable causal covariance constitutes a general challenge for the plausibility of their position. Many thanks to the two anonymous reviewers who challenged and defended my paper on this aspect.

3. I do not aim to show that bodily sensations differ in this regard from exteroceptive sensations of vision, audition, taste, smell, and touch. Further investigation must decide whether strong representationalism can convincingly motivate the introduction of an intentional content for exteroceptive sensations on the basis of reliable causal covariance and biological function. It is not uncontroversial that corresponding arguments are successful with respect to all exteroceptive sensations. For example, there is an active debate about what olfactory sensations represent and whether they represent any particular objective condition at all (Carvalho, 2014; Castro & Seeley, 2014; Cavedon-Taylor, 2018).

4. In everyday life, it may seem difficult, if not impossible, to separate sensory and affective aspects, as we typically experience them as an integrated unit. Especially cases of pain asymbolia have contributed to the now widespread assumption that sensory and affective features of pain can, in principle, occur independently (Bain, 2014; Corns, 2014; Grahek, 2007; Klein, 2015). For the sake of the envisaged argument, I will presuppose that this assumption is uncritical. Furthermore, it should be noted that in order to account for the affective features of pain, some strong representationalists introduce a second evaluative content (Bain, 2013, 2017). According to this view, the intentional content of unpleasant pains is composed of the representation of a certain bodily condition plus the representation of this bodily condition as bad for the subject. Whether strong representationalism can conclusively account for the affective features of pain and other mental phenomena must be the subject of independent debate (e.g., Corns, 2018; Jacobson, 2013).

5. For the sake of simplicity, I will neglect so-called sensory qualities (e.g., pulsing, burning, aching, stinging, or cramping) which have rarely been considered by strong representationalists (Cutter & Tye, 2011).

6. Data available from hospitals or physicians cannot provide the required basis for such analyses because various pains experienced in everyday life, such as the pain of cutting a finger on paper, are not systematically collected. Subjective reports alone do no better because laypeople often cannot adequately evaluate whether an experience of pain is caused by tissue damage or not.

7. In the past, similar objections concerning dissociations between pain and tissue damage have been brought forward (Coninx, 2020a; Corns, 2014; Klein, 2015, 2017). In this section, I aim to connect these objections on the basis of recent empirical data and extend them in light of examples that have thus far received too little attention (e.g., visceral pains). In the upcoming section, I also close possible loopholes for strong representationalists in reference to the biological function of pain.

8. Lately, this issue has been recognized by at least some strong representationalists (Cutter, 2017).

9. It is uncontroversial that these pains constitute pathological disorders. This does not mean that they are pathological because they are non-veridical representations.

10. The case of delayed muscle soreness is more difficult because it is still up for debate what biological function it might serve. Some authors ascribe a warning function which demands the limitation of movement; others argue, in reply, that further performances do not affect the recovery process of the muscles (Nosaka, 2008).

11. In reply, one might argue that it is better to have a system that produces many misfires with significant biological costs than to have no system for the representation of damage at all. For example, the chance of survival of patients suffering from pathological pains is still higher than that of people suffering from congenital analgesia (e.g., Nagasako et al., 2003). However, it remains questionable that this is in fact the default strategy that has prevailed in evolution with regard to one of the most vital systems for most organisms.

12. I am thankful to an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing this point. Interestingly, the problem of demarcation seems to be pressing for both indicative as well as imperative versions of strong intentionalism (Coninx, 2020a, 2020b).

13. The question of whether the introduction of distinct intentional modes for different bodily sensations is empirically justified is closely related to the question of whether pain, itches, and hunger constitute distinct modalities. This issue has been discussed in more detail with respect to pain by Jennifer Corns (2014).

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Sabrina Coninx

Sabrina Coninx is located at the Institute for Philosophy II at the Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). She is a postdoctoral researcher and scientific coordinator of the Research Training Group ‘Situated Cognition’ founded by the German Research Foundation.  Before that, she worked as an assistant professor and managing director of the Master's program in Cognitive Science. She obtained a PhD in Philosophy under the supervision of Prof. Albert Newen (Ruhr University Bochum) and Prof. Colin Klein (Australian National University). She obtained a Master degree in Philosophy and a Bachelor degree in Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Bonn. Sabrina Coninx is a philosopher of mind working at the interface of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry. Her research focuses on phenomena related to human suffering. In due consideration of empirical data, she has primarily worked on the nature of pain and other bodily sensations, including their phenomenology, neural correlates, causal embeddedness, and biological function.