Week 20, SPAH Seminar Series: Feeling that one is in pain and knowing that one is in pain

The School of Philosophy and Art History run seminars every Thursday during term time.

Dr Lucy Campbell from the University of Warwick is running a seminar on 'Feeling that one is in pain and knowing that one is in pain' this Thursday - 18 February 2021. 

Abstract:

It is sometimes suggested that a person knows that she is in pain (when she does) by ‘feeling that’ she is in pain. If this is true, it would undermine a whole philosophical tradition, one which views self-knowledge, canonically including self-knowledge of pain, as importantly unlike other forms of knowledge in virtue of being ‘baseless’. But what does it mean to say that a person ‘can feel that’ she is in pain? I consider various interpretations of ‘feeling that one is in pain’, and argue that on none of these does ‘S can feel that she is in pain’ cite a suitable basis for S’s knowledge that she is in pain. I argue that depending on how ‘feeling that one is in pain’ it is interpreted, the claim that one's self-knowledge of pain is based on feeling that one is in pain is either absurd, or empty. I suggest that we should take the baselessness of self-knowledge seriously. Doing so would rightly be thought theoretically worrisome if it entailed that self-knowledge were utterly opaque to the understanding. But it does not entail this. I close by explaining how a Constitutivist account of self-knowledge can view it as genuinely baseless but yet perfectly explicable. 

If you would like to join this seminar, please email Hannah Whiting, School Manager, for the zoom link: hannah.whiting@essex.ac.uk .