The Myths of Pain -- A Brief and Scattered History of Pain -- A Vague Road Map and Preview -- Pathological Pains -- Setting the Stage -- Are Pains a Mental Disorder? -- A Brief Tour of the Official Line -- The Psychology of Chronic Pain -- Methodological Ills -- Diagnostic Tools -- The Pain Personality -- Mind over Matter? -- The Terms of the Debate -- Mental Causation -- Naturalizing Content -- The Real Question -- In Defense of Lazy Materialism -- Distinctions and Definitions -- Defining Mental States -- Meeting Stich's Challenge: Philosophy's Place in Science -- Mental versus Physical Causes -- What We Don't Know about Brains: Two Competing Perspectives -- The Feature-Detection Perspective -- The Organization of the Brain -- The Feature-Detection Perspective on the Dorsal Horn -- Problems with the Perspective -- The Dynamical Systems Approach -- A Primer on Dynamical Systems -- A Reason to Switch -- A Dynamical Systems Perspective on the Dorsal Horn -- Problems with the Approach -- The Moral of the Story: Incompatible Approaches -- A Difference in Explanatory Strategies -- The Pragmatics of Neuroscience -- The Nature of Pain -- Pain as a Sensory System -- The Complexity of Our Sensory Systems -- A Sketch of Our Pain System -- Philosophy's Error -- The Awfulness of Pain -- Images of Pain -- The Emotion of Pain -- Chronic Pain Possibilities -- The Dynamical Approach -- When a Pain Isn't -- The Strangeness of Pain -- Correlations between Nociception and Perception -- Illusions of Pain -- IASP's Reaction
Summary
"Hardcastle offers a biologically based complex theory of pain processing, inhibition, and sensation and then uses this theory to make several arguments: (1) psychogenic pains do not exist; (2) a general lack of knowledge about fundamental brain function prevents us from distinguishing between mental and physical causes, although the distinction remains useful; (3) most pain talk should be eliminated from both the folk and academic communities; and (4) such a biological approach is useful generally for explaining disorders in pain processing. She shows how her analysis of pain can serve as a model for the analysis of other psychological disorders and suggests that her project be taken as a model for the philosophical analysis of disorders in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience."--Jacket
