Ken Hanly wrote:
>
>
>
> My understanding of W. is that he holds that when we claim we have a pain,
> we do not have criteria for saying it. We simply have the pain. While a
> person could be pretending to have pain as in the cases Justin cites with
> his daughter, if a person is not trying to deceive another then having the
> pain and saying so is not corrigible as I understand W. but I may be wrong.
> Of course there could be borderline sensations not clearly pains.
>
A couple years ago when I was having headaches (not at first recognized either by me or the physicians as migraine because the pain was on the top of the head) so bad they kept sending me to the ER, the ER physician would ask, on a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is the pain. I would give him a number and he would proceed on that basis. Actually it worked pretty well (especially when combined with a blood pressure off the scale) to dictate immediate treatment. Philosophical or epistemological quibbles didn't occur to either of us. And when the surgeon was unscrewing the pegs from my wrist, her speed increased almost exactly in correspondemce to the drumming of my left foot on the table. We communicated very well.
It even works with mental pain. I've had the experience many times, when speaking with a new member of the Depressive support group, of mentioning a symptom only generally and having him/her exclaim, Yes, exactly, I know what you mean. ("I know what you mean" are fighting words when spoken by someone who has never had clinical depression.) I think it's a problem invented in the Seminar room and having no existence otherwise.
Carrol