Pain Intensities

Recent philosophical work on pain distinguishes a variety of pain qualities and the mechanisms that give rise to them, but pain intensity remains a monolithic notion difficult to account for in reductive terms. The reason for this difficulty is that pain intensity is not a unitary phenomenal magnitude; pain is a complex experience featuring distinct intensive dimensions. The sensory intensity of a pain may be accounted for in terms of its salience, understood as the amount of currency it commands in a subject's attentional economy. I demonstrate how this account may be extended to extant representationalist accounts of pain, resulting in a view that is both reductively satisfying and resilient against common foils.