Colin Klein

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462 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2016 last heard Jan 2016

Colin Klein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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New Books in Philosophy · Colin Klein, “What the Body Commands: The Imperative Theory of Pain” (MIT Press, 2015) · 15 Jan 2016 podcast

One, I think it's actually when you start thinking about the sort of pains you have, uh it turns out pains are not nearly as informative as we would like them to be.

Uh so even though I hurt, uh so for example, or example I use a lot, uh I do a lot of weightlifting, uh and the next day I'm often genuinely confused.

I'm always sore, but I can be genuinely confused about whether it's ordinary post exercise.

I don't know and in some sense and this is the sort of intuition that imperativist theory is supposed to capture, in some sense it actually doesn't matter at all what's going on, right?

All that matters in terms of my body, uh, is that uh I s rest and don't use that muscle so that you know, whatever's wrong can fix itself.

So I think pains tend to be not particularly informative and of course they are very sort of directly and obviously motivating.

Uh and so that's a reason and that's of that's an un a disanalogy with say visual sensations that many people have noted as an obstacle for representationalism generally.

Uh so imperativism wants to say, Yeah, look, uh pains very much are very dislike representations.

They motivate us, they don't inform, but that's precisely what imperatives do, and so that's why we should move to imperative content.

Yeah, sure.

So I mean

And as you rightly say, and I put out the book, there is I wanna make this distinction between pain or what we sometimes call when we want to mark it off in English I think uh we call phys we'll sometimes say physical pain.

Um, not in the sort of philosopher sense of physicalists, but just you know, ordinary folks will say, Well, it's you know, physical pain as contrasted with emotional pain, say.

Um, and then there's this what I call suffering or hurt or painfulness or in general that you know, this fact that pains feel bad.

Which as you rarely point out, I mean, many people have thought uh is the kind of the definitive thing about pains.

That's why we don't like pains.

That's why, you know, that's the role pain plays in ethics and so forth.

Um now I do think so I spend a lot of time on this on the book because on the one hand I do think there's an important distinction between the two and I'll talk about that in a second.

I also think that the imperativist has to say that uh there's an important distinction between the two.

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