Feeling that one is in pain and knowing that one is in pain

Event details

Speaker(s): Dr Lucy Campbell, University of Warwick

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 both genuinely baseless and yet perfectly explicable.