Towards Affective-Evaluativism: the Intentional Structure of Unpleasant Pain Experience

Abstract

Abstract Evaluativism about unpleasant pains offers one way to think about unpleasant pain experience. However, extant Evaluativist views do not pay enough attention to the affective dimension of pain experience and the complex relations between the affective, evaluative and sensory dimensions. This paper clarifies these relations and provides a view which more closely reflects the phenomenology of unpleasant pains. It argues that the intentional structure of paradigmatic unpleasant pain is as follows: unpleasant pains essentially involve a proprietary intentional mode—what I call affective-interoception—and a distinctive kind of evaluatively qualified sensory content. The resulting view is Affective-Evaluativism.