Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Whenever a philosopher wants to derail a conversation about consciousness, the reliable move involves bringing up a toothache. Look, the move goes — never mind kitchens and coffee mugs and the perceptual experience of redness; consider the throb in my molar at three in the morning. That represents nothing. It sits in the mouth as a thing in itself. It points to nothing beyond itself. It just throbs. And if any item in the mind deserves to count as an inner object the mind directly inspects, surely the toothache earns the title.

The move has hardened into a reflex. I have seen it deployed, with some satisfaction, in conference hallways by people who otherwise agree on almost nothing. It also goes wrong, in an interesting way, and the way it goes wrong tells you something about what gets misrepresented when philosophers reach for the inner-object picture.

Start with what makes pain seem like the killer counterexample. Perceptual experience can plausibly be analyzed as a representational achievement: when I see the mug, my visual system represents a ceramic object on the table, and the phenomenal feel of that experience consists in how the world gets represented — the colors, the shape, the way the handle juts out. Anti-intentionalists struggle with that case, because perception so obviously points outward. But pain does not seem to point anywhere. It does not seem to misrepresent or correctly represent. It does not even seem to carry an “of.” It throbs. Crane, in his 1998 paper Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental, puts the worry as crisply as anyone: intentionality consists in of-ness or about-ness, and pain plainly fails that test. The toothache fails to point at the tooth the way the visual experience points at the mug. It just sits in the mouth and hurts.

That marks the strongest form of the objection. We owe it that.¹

Now slow it down. When the toothache throbs at three in the morning, where, in fact, does it throb? In the molar. The lower-left one. Maybe radiating into the jaw. Anyone with a toothache can locate it precisely enough to point to it for the dentist. The pain carries a felt location — and felt locations give the game away. A sensation that locates itself in the molar amounts, on its face, to a sensation about the molar. It says, in a non-verbal way: something is happening here. The phenomenal character of the pain — the throbbing, the heat, the dull weight beneath the throb — consists in how the experience represents the felt location and the felt disturbance. Michael Tye developed this line through the late 1990s. David Bain’s 2003 paper then shows how the felt-location story recovers most of what the friend of pain-qua-inner-object wants, without paying the metaphysical price.²

The price the inner-object picture demands runs high. If the pain consists in a private inner item — call it Throb — then Throb carries properties: a color (none?), a duration, a magnitude, a kind of intrinsic awfulness. Throb hangs out somewhere. Not in the molar, since the molar sits out in the world; in the mind, by which we apparently mean a non-spatial location that nonetheless hosts colorless items with magnitudes. We have repeated the kitchen-in-the-skull problem with a different vocabulary. The toothache cannot literally sit in the head the way the molar sits in the head, since heads do not contain throbs in that sense. So the intrinsic-Throb theorist quickly retreats to a representation-of-Throb, at which point the original move has been conceded twice over. The inner item turns out to have been a description of how the experience represents the body all along.

The harder objection comes from the affective side. Even granting the felt location, pain carries an unpleasantness that nothing about a tooth, considered as a tooth, seems to require. The molar, qua molar, does not feel unpleasant. The pain does. So even if the locational element of pain admits a representational gloss, the awfulness — the thing that makes pain matter — looks like a brute residue. Surely that residue must be the inner item — the thing pain consists in.

But consider what the unpleasantness amounts to. It does not float as an unanchored bad feeling in inner space. It functions as the unpleasantness of a tissue disturbance in a specific location, and crucially, of a tissue disturbance the organism has strong reason to attend to. Pain unpleasantness serves as the affective representation of bodily trouble that calls for action. The throb does not just locate; it imports an evaluative gloss — this matters, this hurts, do something — that integrates the locational content with the motivational machinery the body uses to keep itself intact. Bain spends much of his paper arguing that only this account of pain unpleasantness avoids collapse into dualism or incoherence: the affective dimension carries its own representational content, along a dimension orthogonal to color and shape.³ The pain represents the tooth as in trouble and as bad. And the badness floats no more freely as an inner item than the redness of the mug floats as a ceramic ghost behind the cup.

Crane’s worry, restated charitably, comes to this: when we use intentional in the technical sense — content with truth conditions, propositional structure, of-ness in the way a thought points at its object — pain does not fit cleanly. He has that right. But he has overgeneralized. The right reply: pain carries non-conceptual representational content of a bodily and affective kind. It need not run propositional to count as world-directed, where the relevant world amounts to the animal’s own body.⁴ The phenomenal character of the toothache consists in how the experience represents a tissue disturbance in the lower-left molar as location-bearing, intensity-bearing, and aversively bad. That counts as a great deal of content. It loses no rigor merely because it fails to fit into a that-clause.

One final move stops the toothache argument from posing as a counterexample and turns it into a confirmation. Wittgenstein, late in the Investigations, asked his readers to consider what it could even mean to posit a private inner item — a beetle in a box, in his famous figure — that played no role in the public economy of pain language. His answer, roughly: nothing would turn on it; the box might sit empty for all the difference it would make.⁵ The intentionalist makes a related point in a sunnier register. We need no private inner Throb. The felt location plus the felt unpleasantness plus the action-orienting affect already account for everything pain does and shows. Add the inner item and you have added a metaphysical bauble that pays no rent. Subtract it, and the toothache still wakes you up.

So yes, when the dentist asks where it hurts, point to the molar. That marks where the pain lives, and the pain lives there the same way any experienced feature of the world appears there: by being represented. The mind does not stare at an inner sore. It registers, with admirable fidelity, that something has gone wrong in the lower-left molar at three in the morning, and that this counts, in the strongest possible sense, as bad.

The window was always clean. Even when it hurts to look through.

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Notes

1. Tim Crane, “Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental,” in Current Issues in Philosophy of Mind, ed. Anthony O’Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 229–251, esp. §3. Crane’s worry — that pain resists the of-ness gloss central to intentionality — is the most carefully developed version of the standard objection, and the present essay treats it as the steel-manned position. Crane himself softens the line in later work (see his “The Intentional Structure of Consciousness,” in Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Quentin Smith and Aleksandar Jokic [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 33–56), allowing that bodily sensations have intentional structure even if their content is not propositional. Ch01.2 of this volume develops the broader case against the thin “about-ness” reading of Brentano; this essay applies the same diagnostic move to the harder case of pain. ↩
2. David Bain, “Intentionalism and Pain,” Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2003): 502–523. Bain’s central move is to treat the felt location of pain as a representational feature with non-conceptual content — pain represents bodily damage as occurring here — and to argue that this representational structure recovers everything the inner-object theorist wants without the metaphysical commitments. The position descends from Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), ch. 4, and Tye’s later “The Nature of Pain and the Appearance/Reality Distinction,” in Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study, ed. Murat Aydede (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 99–120. The phantom-limb extension — pain locating itself in a limb the world no longer contains — appears in Ch04.2 of this volume; the present essay handles the directed case. ↩
3. Bain, “Intentionalism and Pain,” §§4–5. Bain’s account of the affective dimension treats unpleasantness as a second representational layer — a non-conceptual evaluative content — rather than as a brute phenomenal residue. The structural move: just as the visual representation of red carries both descriptive content (the surface property) and evaluative content (its salience, its relevance to action), the pain representation carries both locational content (the tooth) and evaluative content (its badness). Brian Cutter develops a related position with somewhat different machinery in “Tracking Representationalism and the Painfulness of Pain” (manuscript; cf. his “Pains and Reasons: Why It Is Rational to Kill the Messenger,” Philosophical Quarterly 67 [2017]: 423–433), and the Cutter and Tye accounts now constitute the two main intentionalist treatments of pain unpleasantness in the contemporary literature. ↩
4. The non-conceptual content move is the key technical lever in the intentionalist response to Crane. Non-conceptual content is content the subject can have without possessing the concepts that would specify it propositionally — the kind of fine-grained spatial and qualitative content a perceiver has when they see a particular shade of red without commanding the concept vermilion. Tye’s PANIC theory (Ten Problems of Consciousness, ch. 5) builds non-conceptual content into the conditions for phenomenal consciousness; Crane himself accepts the existence of non-conceptual content but is more cautious about its application to pain (see Elements of Mind [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], ch. 5). The present essay grants Crane the technical point and resists the metaphysical inference — non-conceptual content is enough to make pain world-directed in the relevant sense, even if it does not fit cleanly into the that-clause grammar of belief and desire. ↩
5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), §293. The beetle-in-the-box argument is sometimes read as a behaviorist reduction of pain to pain-behavior, but the more careful reading — defended by P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), Part I — treats it as an argument about the grammar of pain-talk: if a putative inner object plays no role in the public criteria for pain-attribution, the metaphysical posit is idle. The intentionalist conclusion drawn here is sunnier than Wittgenstein’s: not that there is nothing inner, but that whatever is inner gets fully captured by the representational structure of the experience. The argumentative effect on the inner-object theorist is the same. ↩