The Structure of Unpleasantness
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The Structure of Unpleasantness Abraham Sapién 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract A fair amount of the philosophical discussion about pain and unpleasantness has focused on providing a constitutive account of unpleasantness. These theories provide a more fundamental description of what unpleasantness is by appealing to other wellestablished notions in the architecture of the mind. In contrast, I address the nature of unpleasantness from a structural account. I will argue for how unpleasantness is built, rather than what unpleasantness is made of, as it were. I focus on the heterogeneity of experience, which has been a somewhat neglected issue in the literature about unpleasantness: after careful introspection, there seems to be nothing phenomenal that all and only unpleasant experiences share. In order to address the heterogeneity of unpleasant experiences, I propose that the structure of the rich phenomenology of unpleasantness should be understood as a determinable property constituted by multiple essential dimensions.
1 Introduction What makes unpleasant experiences unpleasant? Behind this apparently naïve question lies something rather relevant about the nature of suffering. A fair amount of the philosophical discussion about pain and unpleasantness has focused on providing a constitutive account of unpleasantness. These theories provide a more fundamental description of what unpleasantness is by appealing to other well-stablished notions in the architecture of the mind. In contrast, I address the nature of unpleasantness from a structural account. I will argue for how we should understand the structure of unpleasantness, how unpleasantness is built, rather than what unpleasantness is made of, as it were. We can divide the question of what constitutes unpleasantness between internalist and externalist conceptions. Most authors discussing about the nature of pain think of it as a composite experience, a sort of portmanteau phenomenon. A typical unpleasant pain is constituted by: 1) a sensory aspect, the pain sensation in itself, which is not unpleasant and does not imply a form of suffering, and 2) a hedonic aspect, the unpleasantness itself, the
* Abraham Sapién [email protected]
1
Universidad Pedagógica Nacional (UPN), Mexico City, Mexico
Sapién A.
aspect of the experience in virtue of which it hurts and one suffers from it. I will be focusing merely on the second aspect and on the different theories that try to account for it.1 In one corner, we find the internalist team, what I call the content theories. According to a standard version of internalism, unpleasantness is: 1) a phenomenal property, it is a felt aspect of experience, and 2) it is an intrinsic property of mental states. This intrinsic felt aspect of experience is, in one way or another, constituted by some form of intentional mental content, either: 1) evaluative (Bain 2012, 2013; Cutter and Tye 2014; Helm 2002; Tye 1995, 2006), or 2) imperative (Barlassina and Hayward forthcoming; Hall 2008; Klein 2007, 2012; Klein and Martíne
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