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Pain and Pain Behaviour

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Colin Radford
Affiliation:
University of Kent.

Extract

What is the connection between pain and pain behaviour? Is it logically necessary, or is it contingent? Or is it too complex to be classified in terms of this Humean dichotomy? Surely it is too complex, for if we say the relationship is a necessary one, we should, apparently, have to deny that there could be pain without pain behaviour, or pain behaviour without pain; yet stoicism and shamming pain occur. If we say that the relationship is not necessary and so contingent, we should have to say that the natural correlate or expression of pain might have been languor or jolly laughter, and, conversely, that wincing, grimacing, writhing, groaning, etc., might have been the natural correlate or expression of sensations quite different from pains. To avoid the first difficulty it could be said that necessary connections need not be invariant. To avoid the second, it might be pointed out that some contingent connections are less contingent than others, and that, in particular, causal relationships need not always be of the external, Humean kind. But even if these observations are correct they are difficult precisely because they attempt to soften and blur a distinction whose hardness and exhaustiveness is constitutive of its clarity and strength. If we modify Hume's law we may do so only after a careful examination of a case which forces us to do so.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1972

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References

1 In ‘Operationalism and Ordinary Language’, American Philosophical Quarterly Vol. II (1965)Google Scholar, republished in Pitcher, G.'s collection Wittgenstein, pp. 384419Google Scholar. All subsequent page references are to this volume.

2 Cf. Freud, , pp. 120–1Google Scholar, A general Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. Riviere, J., (New York, 1960).Google Scholar

3 The association of pain with physical damage explains the usual force of the word ‘hurt’, even though pains hurt when they are not caused by damage and a creature who has been damaged has therefore been hurt even if it causes him no pain.

4 For references, see Chapter 7, Pain and Emotion, by Trigg, Roger, (O.U.P., 1970).Google Scholar

5 The effects of early experience on the response to pain’, by Melzack, R. and Scott, T. H., Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1957, vol. 50 pp. 155161.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

6 Cf. ‘Unfelt pain is a contradiction’, p. 5Google Scholar. Trigg (ibid.).