![]() In rare cases, it is argued, the sensory component might be present while the hedomotive component is absent, the subject thus undergoing an experience with all of a pain’s other properties but not its unpleasantness. Hence many take typical, unpleasant pain experiences to comprise dissociable components: a neutral, sensory component, and a “hedomotive” component, the latter contributing the experience’s unpleasantness and motivational force. When you are jabbed with a pin, one of these pathways underlies the experience’s unpleasantness the other underlies further, sensory aspects of the experience’s phenomenology. ![]() It is often claimed that pain processing involves two neural pathways (Price 2000 see also Shriver, this volume). This category includes not only pains, and arguably not all pains. Our focus on the negative side of sensory affect extends beyond pain, however, to all unpleasant sensory experiences. We therefore eschew its broader use, in which it refers to all states of suffering, not only those involving physical pain but also grief, depression, anxiety and so forth. We use it, narrowly, to refer to so-called physical pains, experiences in which a subject has-or seems to have-pains in a part of her own body, for example in her hand, immersed in freezing water. Turning to “pain”, it too has broader and narrower uses. Still, for our purposes, it suffices to say that our focus is on the pleasantness of sensory experiences. ![]() There are also difficult questions about how to individuate experiences and other mental states, and how to apportion pleasantness among them. How to categorise a given case will often be difficult, of course, not least because of top-down modulation: the farmer’s appreciation of the significance of the taste might affect her gustatory experience, rendering it pleasant. Footnote 1 Is this a case of sensory pleasure? We shall take it to be so only if her sensory experience-for example the gustatory cum olfactory cum tactile experience of tasting the strawberry-is itself pleasant, hence not if her only pleasant state is her happiness that her crop is ready to harvest. Consider the strawberry farmer who dislikes the taste of ripe strawberries yet takes pleasure in eating one of her own because she knows that the ripe taste means her crop is ready to harvest. Identifying pleasures as sensory is not straightforward. Hence we use “pleasure” narrowly, to refer to sensory pleasure, and eschew its broader use, which encompasses such arguably non-sensory pleasures as joy, delight, and happiness. Like many (but not all) our contributors, we focus on sensory affect. ![]()
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