7.1 The Intentionality Objection

The identity claim hands its opponents a clean target. Produce a state that unmistakably feels like something and represents nothing, and the claim collapses. Unlike the elaborate thought experiments to come, this objection needs no philosophical machinery; it asks only that you stub your toe.

Look, it says, the representationalist has told a lovely story about seeing tomatoes. Vision is about the world; fine. But not all experience is vision, and the cases you have quietly set to one side are the ones that matter. Take a toothache at three in the morning. What does it represent? Nothing. It does not present a tomato or a tree or any worldly object; it simply hurts, sitting there in the jaw as a raw felt quality, a throb that is about as much “about” something as a cramp is an argument. Take a mood — the flat gray dread that is on you the moment you wake, before the coffee, before the news, attached to nothing, pointed at nothing, and yet unmistakably felt. These states have phenomenal character in abundance. They have representational content nowhere. They are the felt-quality-without-content the identity claim says cannot exist. The claim is not refined by these cases. It is refuted by them.

The objection identifies the right test. A toothache need not present an external object as vision does to represent something: it may present the body. But that reply only begins the argument. Pain’s location, its hurting, and a mood’s diffuse hold on the day each need an account; giving one of them content cannot settle the others.

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7.2 The Inner-Sensation Picture, and the Phantom Limb

Start with the account of pain so obvious it scarcely feels like a theory. On this picture, a pain is a private hurt—a felt thing, a quale—residing wherever the mind resides, which Cartesian inheritance places somewhere behind the eyes. The toe merely seems to hurt, a geographical illusion staged by the nervous system. Signals travel upward; the hurting happens in the inner theater; the mind projects it back down as a useful fiction.

Consider phantom-limb pain. A man wakes in a hospital bed three weeks after the accident, and his right foot hurts — not vaguely: it burns, it throbs, the toes cramp as though someone were bending them back. The foot was amputated below the knee. He knows this. He can see the bandaged stump where the leg now ends. And the toes he no longer has go on aching, vividly, as if a hot wire were laid against them. The neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran documents them by the ward-full; he has spent a career turning these uncanny cases into windows onto how the brain builds the body, and once relieved a phantom’s clenched-fist cramp with nothing but a mirror and a cardboard box. They are not exotic. Most amputees report phantom sensations, and a large fraction of those are painful.¹

The inner-sensation picture cannot place phantom pain in missing toes, so it puts the pain in the brain and treats its felt location as projection.

If the phantom’s pain is really in his head and only seems to be in his toes, then the same must hold for every pain, since the phantom case differs from the ordinary case only in the absence of the limb, not in the character of the experience. So when a child snatches her hand back from the stove and wails that her finger hurts, the strict inner-sensation theory must treat the hurt as intracranial and the finger as its merely projected address. A sophisticated defender can accept that result. She can say that ordinary pain talk reports the projection rather than making a naive anatomical claim. Fair enough. But the account now needs two elements: a private hurt and a standing mechanism that assigns it the bodily location already built into the representational account. The issue turns on economy and unification, not on convicting the child of bad grammar.

Chapter 5’s vehicle/object distinction removes one reason for relocating the hurt: the neural process need not occupy the place the experience presents as hurting. That answers the location puzzle. It does not yet answer a theorist who grants the bodily representation and holds that its painfulness consists in a further intrinsic quality. She need posit no inner spectator. Her objection waits in Section 7.4.

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7.3 Pain as the Body’s Alarm

The alternative explains ordinary and phantom pain through one bodily-address relation.²

A pain experience represents a condition of the body. Provisionally, its content presents an actual or impending threat to bodily integrity at a represented location, under an evaluative mode: something threatens this part of you, and it matters. The “here” belongs to the content. To have a pain in the toe is to undergo an experience that presents a threat at the toe. A headache or toothache can instead present a condition within the head; nothing in this account requires an object outside the skull. The distinction concerns the neural vehicle and the represented bodily condition, wherever that condition lies. Chapter 15 must earn the naturalistic details of this content rather than letting this chapter adjust them case by case.

Think of pain as a notice posted at a bodily site: threat here, attend now. Like any notice, it can be posted accurately or in error.

In the ordinary case, you stub your toe and the pain accurately presents a threat there. That is why we say, without strain or error, that the toe hurts.

In the phantom case, the same kind of experience presents a threat at absent toes and so misrepresents. The phantom and the stubbed toe share a bodily address; they differ in accuracy, like the bent stick and the straight one. There is no inner item to relocate — only a representation that sometimes gets the body wrong. In pain, “outward” reaches only as far as the body.³

The alarm, in short, went on sounding in a wing of the building that no longer stood. The wiring did not know.

Understanding why it persists does not make living with it easier. The mistake concerns the represented foot, not the reality of the man’s suffering.

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7.4 But Pain Hurts

The objection now reaches the genuinely hard point.

Fine, the objection says. Grant that pain has a locative, bodily content — that it represents the toe, the tooth, the back. You have explained the part of pain that points somewhere. You have not touched the part that matters. Because pain does not merely locate; it hurts. There is something awful about it, a felt badness, and surely that — the sheer hurting — is not a representation of anything. The hurting is the inner quale the representational account keeps promising to reach and never reaches. You have re-described the address on the envelope and said nothing about why the letter is a scream.

Repeating that pain represents the body will not answer this objection. Consider one aching ankle. The ache locates the disturbance there, presents it as bad for you, and presses you to keep weight off it. Those contributions can differ: you might recognize the location yet feel little distress, or feel the distress while deciding that walking to safety matters more. Locating, evaluating, and directing action do different work. An evaluation can misrepresent; a command can go unfulfilled even when acting on it would help. The account identifies hurting with the bodily-affective presentation of badness, not with obeying the instruction or coolly judging that the ankle needs care.

David Bain develops the evaluativist account: pain presents a bodily disturbance as bad for the subject, and its unpleasantness consists in that evaluative content.⁴ Colin Klein’s imperativist account instead treats pain as an order to protect the body. It captures the ankle’s demand without making that demand a statement. The view defended here keeps evaluative, locative content because it needs an account of how pain gets the body right or wrong. Calling the presentation evaluative identifies the proposed answer; it does not prove that nothing remains beyond it.

Hilla Jacobson asked why we so often try to silence the messenger, and Matthew Kinakin presses the ordinary painkiller harder. If pain presents the bodily condition as bad, why aim the drug at the experience when the condition remains? And what warrants the judgment I cannot stand how this feels? Part of the answer concerns gain control: an alarm can outlive its usefulness, consuming attention, sleep, and coordinated action without improving protection. Brian Cutter and Michael Tye distinguish the reason to treat a represented threat from the reason to want the signaling state gone. The messenger belongs to the control system too.⁵

The painkiller presses further than wasted attention or lost sleep. Even a brief pain with no lasting practical cost can give someone reason to want relief. Explaining the usefulness of quieting an alarm therefore cannot exhaust the reason to stop hurting. On the identity account, undergoing the bodily-affective state supplies access to its aversive character; a judgment that this experience is bad concerns that same occurring state, without discovering an extra inner quality. Kinakin’s challenge remains: what warrants the judgment if first-order evaluation concerns the ankle? Merely pointing out that the judgment itself has content does not answer him. The account must explain that first-person access, not reduce suffering to inconvenience.

Why should even evaluative content hurt? A dashboard can flag damage and stay as cool as its glass. Chapter 6’s identity proposal concerns a bodily-affective presentation within an identified subject’s conscious life, not a warning symbol or an isolated damage signal. Its advantage would consist in explaining location, felt urgency, and their dissociations through one independently specified profile. If that profile leaves a stable difference in hurting unexplained, the identity loses. Section 10.6 tests whether a further phenomenal ingredient improves the explanation; it cannot derive painfulness from the word bad.

In pain asymbolia, usually associated with damage to the insular and parietal-opercular cortex, patients respond to noxious stimulation with strikingly little distress or avoidance.⁶ Reports in the classic literature describe preserved discrimination and location alongside flattened affective and motivational response. Whether those subjects still feel pain without painfulness, rather than registering noxious stimulation without pain, has become a live dispute. That taxonomic question matters. The chapter cannot settle it by borrowing the word pain from the syndrome’s name.

Under the standard interpretation, bodily location and affect come apart. That fits the distinction the ankle case introduced, with sensory discrimination and felt badness available to different forms of disruption.

The quale theorist therefore has a real reply. She can say that asymbolia removes the patient’s aversive reaction while leaving sensory content and intrinsic sensory character intact; Grahek’s phrase reactive dissociation leaves room for that reading. The representationalist answers that the missing dimension behaves like an evaluation, altering attention, significance, and action together. Yet a theory of content plus reaction can explain that pattern too. Asymbolia identifies dimensions an adequate theory must distinguish. The preference for identifying affect with evaluative presentation rests on the wider case in Chapter 6, not on a clinical result that already chose our metaphysics.

The toothache at three in the morning is the body, in the dark, insisting (falsely or truly) that something threatens its integrity at that tooth and matters terribly. It was about something all along. It was about you.

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7.5 The Intransitive Objection

Murat Aydede presses the pain objection as a fellow naturalist demanding that perceptual and strong representational theories explain pain’s peculiar phenomenology rather than merely rename it.⁷ The surface grammar makes the trouble vivid. When I say I see a tree, the verb takes an object, something my seeing concerns and can get right or wrong. But I have a pain in my foot reads less like I see a tree than like I have a bruise on my foot. The pain seems merely located, sitting at a place, not directed at an object the way perception reaches the world. Aydede’s stronger point survives any quick grammatical reply: the representationalist must supply independent grounds for accuracy conditions instead of declaring pain perceptual because phantom cases make that description convenient.

The reply grants the grammar and makes a comparative case. The locative “in” of a pain in my foot behaves unlike the bare location of a bruise on my foot. Pain directs protection toward a represented region; ordinary, referred, and phantom pain can conflict with touch, vision, and the body’s actual condition; and one bodily-address relation explains both the matches and the mismatches. The sensation theorist can call location an intrinsic or projected feature, but then projection must reproduce the same pattern while leaving the private hurt itself without an address. The representational account builds the address into the state from the start.

The phantom-bruise contrast makes that comparison memorable without proving it by itself. A bruise merely occupies its place. It cannot disagree with an empty foot. A pain can present the absent foot as threatened even while vision and belief insist that no foot remains. You cannot have a phantom bruise. You can have a phantom pain. That difference gives us an abductive clue: pain behaves like a state answerable to the body it presents. Chapter 15’s proper-function account must supply the final warrant for calling that bodily address accurate or inaccurate. For now, the representational reading unifies more of the pattern with less machinery.

Pain offers no easy counterexample. Bodily address explains more than a contentless hurt plus projection, while asymbolia supplies a contested but important dissociation.

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7.6 Moods, the Last Refuge

Pain at least happens somewhere: the tooth, the toe, the back. Moods need not offer even that foothold. You wake in a bad mood. Nothing has happened. The coffee has not burned, the news has not arrived, the cat has not yet knocked anything off the dresser. The day sits in front of you, blank, and already it feels wrong. Pressed to say what the mood is about, you would shrug; pressed harder you might gesture at the weather, or last night’s dream, or the slow gray weight of February, and none of it would quite fit. The mood arrived uninvited and seems to point at nothing whatever. Here, surely, is phenomenal character with no object at all.⁸

The temptation rests partly on grammar. We expect a representational state to take a bounded object: I see the lemon. I fear the dog. I remember the kitchen. Free-floating dread seems to lack the required noun.

The missing noun leaves several possibilities. Three intentionalist accounts give the mood content concerning:

1. a global condition of the body;
2. the surrounding field taken as a whole; or
3. an affective property represented without any bearer at all.

Watch what a mood actually does. Depression does not show up as one more item in consciousness, sitting in a corner next to the lemon and the kitchen. It shows up as the way everything else shows up. The coffee tastes faintly of nothing; the conversations feel thin and far away; the future tilts subtly downward; the kitchen you have stood in ten thousand times looks, this morning, like a place to be gotten through. Nothing in particular looks bad. The whole field has acquired a negative cast, a kind of weather. Matthew Ratcliffe describes such states as bodily background orientations that alter salience, possibility, familiarity, and the shape of action itself.⁹ He does not thereby join the representationalist camp. He supplies the phenomenological bridge: mood can reach beyond a discrete object without collapsing into an inner patch of weather.

The bodily reading starts from anxiety’s tight chest, depression’s weight, elation’s lift, and what trained attention often finds when it turns toward a mood. That account explains the mood’s somatic grip and asks no mysterious object to carry it. But body alone can underdescribe the way a mood transforms the future, other people, and the space of possible action. The field reading catches that reach. It treats the mood as presenting the world or situation under a diffuse affective mode, a wash of threat or warmth or wrongness over the scene. Its cost lies in the phrase the world as a whole: unless Chapter 15 can supply determinate accuracy conditions, “everything” threatens to become a blank check rather than content.

Angela Mendelovici offers the third account. Some moods, she argues, represent affective properties left unbound: threat, elation, or bleakness without an object that bears them. That makes her an ally against contentlessness and an opponent of the object-involving reading favored here. Her account honors the felt absence of an object instead of explaining it away. It also asks us to understand property-content without a bearer and owes a further account of why mood so often reorganizes body and field together. The comparison therefore favors a body-and-field account, provisionally: bodily orientation and worldly salience work as two aspects of one situated presentation.¹⁰ The naturalistic story that fixes its content waits for Chapter 15. On that reading, the slot the objection found empty holds the largest object there is. The object was just everything.

Try to attend to your bad mood directly: look at it rather than through it, and catch the dread apart from the dingy kitchen, the irritating cat, and the day-to-be-gotten-through. Trained attention may find tightness, heaviness, agitation, or a diffuse affective tone. What it does not uncover is a detachable inner object. It finds more body, more world, or the affective mode under which both appear. The mood need not slip every time for transparency to matter. It need only refuse the role of mental paint displayed behind the scene.

But a serious rival can grant every change in the kitchen and deny that the mood itself represents anything. A nonintentional affective background might cause the coffee to seem tasteless, the conversation remote, and the future closed. It need not resemble a patch on an inner screen, and it need not lack structure. Showing that mood changes content does not show that mood consists in content.

I favor the situated presentation because the bodily weight and the altered possibilities arrive as an organized way of meeting the day. The rival must explain that organization too, but may do so through a contentless cause and its contentful effects. The choice turns on whether we can specify the body’s and the situation’s contribution independently, then show what would count as getting them right or wrong. A shift in felt mood with that complete presentation genuinely unchanged would count against identity. Chapter 15 owes this application as well as its account of animal perception. Until then, the kitchen gives us a reason to pursue the representational account, not a reason to dismiss the person who finds a feeling we have yet to explain.

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Chapter Summary

The claim. Pain and objectless mood form the two strongest families of the intentionality objection. Neither supplies a felt character with no content that would sink the identity claim outright.

Where the argument stands. Pain finds its best single explanation as a bodily threat presented under an evaluative mode; phantom pain shows how its address can go wrong. Asymbolia does not decide between evaluative content and aversive reaction. The body-and-field account of mood remains the view I favor, but a contentless affective background causing changes in presentation remains a serious rival.

What’s left open. The account must explain why suffering itself warrants relief, not merely why an alarm becomes costly. Chapter 10 asks whether a further phenomenal ingredient helps; Chapter 15 must explain what fixes the accuracy of pain’s bodily address and a mood’s diffuse presentation. Neither clinical dissociation nor the kitchen scene settles those questions.

The hand-off. The two strongest cases have supplied no contentless experience. The book now turns to external rivals, starting with Mary in her black-and-white room.

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Notes

1. V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: William Morrow, 1998), chs. 1–3, on phantom limbs, the remapping of body representation in somatosensory cortex, and the mirror-box relief of phantom cramp. The prevalence figure (the large majority of amputees experience phantom sensations, a substantial fraction of them painful) is standard in the clinical literature; see also Ronald Melzack, “Phantom Limbs and the Concept of a Neuromatrix,” Trends in Neurosciences 13, no. 3 (1990): 88–92, whose neuromatrix model independently supports the chapter’s point that the felt body is a construction the brain maintains with or without the limb — which is why the representation can persist, and misfire, after amputation. ↩
2. The representational account of pain followed here is developed in Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), ch. 4, and “Another Look at Representationalism about Pain,” in Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study, ed. Murat Aydede (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 99–120. Tye’s PANIC framework treats pain as poised, abstract, nonconceptual, intentional content directed at a bodily region; the chapter adopts the structural claim while stating its own provisional content more carefully as an actual or impending threat to bodily integrity at a represented location, under an evaluative mode. ↩
3. The parallel between phantom pain and misrepresentation in vision (the bent stick, the mirage) connects to the error machinery the book grounds in Part Three. What makes a pain state present an actual or impending threat to bodily integrity at the toe — rather than merely arise from toe damage — is the teleofunctional account of content developed in Chapter 15 (Millikan, Dretske): the state has the proper function of indicating a threat at a bodily location, which allows it to misrepresent when it fires without the corresponding condition. The phantom limb is to the body-monitoring system what the frog’s misfiring fly-detector is to the frog: a representation discharging its function in the absence of its object. Until that account is in hand, the directedness of pain remains a promissory note, marked here and redeemed in Part Three on the same schedule as the identity claim’s own “content of the right kind.” ↩
4. David Bain, “Intentionalism and Pain,” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 213 (2003): 502–523, and “What Makes Pains Unpleasant?,” Philosophical Studies 166, suppl. 1 (2013): 69–89, develop the evaluativist position: the unpleasantness of pain consists in the experience’s representing the bodily disturbance as bad for the subject, where the badness is representational content, not a non-intentional residue. Bain’s response to the standard objection (that a pain could represent damage without feeling bad) is that the felt badness just is a further layer of (evaluative) content, which is the move Section 7.4 relies on. For the contrasting “tracking” version, on which painfulness is identified with the representation of a specific bodily property, see Brian Cutter and Michael Tye, “Tracking Representationalism and the Painfulness of Pain,” Philosophical Issues 21 (2011): 90–109. ↩
5. Colin Klein, What the Body Commands: The Imperative Theory of Pain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), and “An Imperative Theory of Pain,” Journal of Philosophy 104, no. 10 (2007): 517–532; see also Manolo Martínez, “Imperative Content and the Painfulness of Pain,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10, no. 1 (2011): 67–90. Imperative content has a world-to-mind direction of fit: it commands rather than describes. That differs directly from the truth-apt locative and evaluative content the chapter needs for ordinary and phantom pain, so the house view treats imperative force as a friendly rival or intentional mode, not an interchangeable formulation. Hilla Jacobson, “Killing the Messenger: Representationalism and the Painfulness of Pain,” Philosophical Quarterly 63 (2013): 509–519, poses the action-directed challenge. Brian Cutter and Michael Tye answer it in “Pains and Reasons: Why It Is Rational to Kill the Messenger,” Philosophical Quarterly 64, no. 256 (2014): 423–433, doi:10.1093/pq/pqu025. Matthew Kinakin sharpens both the motivational and epistemic problems in “Why Intentionalists Can’t Take Painkillers,” Philosophical Studies 183 (2026): 1905–1929, doi:10.1007/s11098-026-02523-z. The text considers a first-order gain-control answer but acknowledges its limits: pain may warrant relief even without further impairment, and a second-order evaluation’s having content does not explain its epistemic warrant. Neither point by itself establishes nonrepresentational phenomenal paint. The positive account of that warrant remains unfinished. ↩
6. The classic philosophical treatment is Nikola Grahek, Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), which assembles asymbolia and related “reactive dissociation” cases. The classification now stands contested. Trevor Griffith and Adrian Kind, “Pain Asymbolia Is Not Pain,” Philosophy of Science 91, no. 3 (2024): 561–578, doi:10.1017/psa.2023.167, argue that the clinical evidence does not support pain-without-painfulness. Alexandre Duval and Colin Klein, “Pain Asymbolia Is Probably Still Pain,” Philosophy of Science 93, no. 1 (2026): 221–229, doi:10.1017/psa.2025.10098, defend the standard taxonomy while emphasizing what remains unresolved. The body therefore uses the dissociation comparatively and does not treat the syndrome’s name as a settled description of its phenomenology. ↩
7. Murat Aydede, “Is Feeling Pain the Perception of Something?,” Journal of Philosophy 106, no. 10 (2009): 531–567, doi:10.5840/jphil20091061033, presses the full-strength challenge to perceptual and strong representational theories of pain. For the scientific and conceptual background, see Murat Aydede and Güven Güzeldere, “Some Foundational Problems in the Scientific Study of Pain,” Philosophy of Science 69, no. 3S (2002): S265–S283. A kindred resistance, on which pain includes nonrepresentational “mental paint,” appears in Ned Block, “Mental Paint,” in Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, ed. Martin Hahn and Bjørn Ramberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 165–200. The phantom-bruise comparison belongs to this book and functions as abductive evidence only; Chapter 15 owes the proper-function account that warrants accuracy talk. ↩
8. David Bourget and Angela Mendelovici, “Tracking Representationalism: Lycan, Dretske, and Tye,” in Andrew Bailey, ed., Philosophy of Mind: The Key Thinkers (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), identify “elation, free-floating anxiety, or pervasive sadness” as cases that do not readily qualify objects. William G. Lycan argues instead that even vague moods carry representational content in “The Intentionality of Smell” (2014). Angela Mendelovici, “Intentionalism about Moods,” Thought 2, no. 1 (2013): 126–136, doi:10.1002/tht3.81, states the apparent counterexample at full strength before answering it. ↩
9. Matthew Ratcliffe, Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), develops “existential feelings” as background bodily-affective orientations that shape the sense of reality and belonging. When disturbed, they show up in depression and depersonalization as a changed way the world is given rather than a discrete inner object. Ratcliffe does not endorse Tyean representationalism; the chapter cites him as a convergent witness on the phenomenology, not an ally on the metaphysics. ↩
10. Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), esp. sec. 4.10, and Consciousness, Color, and Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), esp. 51, reads moods as representations of global states of the body or situation. Mendelovici, “Intentionalism about Moods,” cited n. 8, develops the unbound-affective-properties account: some moods represent affective properties such as threat or elation without representing an object as bearing them. That view supports intentional content while resisting this chapter’s preferred object-involving interpretation. Her later The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) reverses this book’s order of explanation, giving phenomenology priority over intentionality; its Chapter 7 concerns thought rather than moods. ↩