It can seem natural to say that, when in pain, we undergo experiences representing certain experience-dependent particulars, namely pains. As part of his wider approach to mind and world, John McDowell has elaborated an interesting but neglected version of this account of pain. Here I set out McDowell’s account at length, and place it in context. I argue that his subjectivist conception of the objects of pain experience is incompatible with his requirement that such experience be presentational, rationalising, and classificatory.

Color, Externalism, and Switch Cases, Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 45, no. 3, Fall 2007. (11,500 words).

I defend externalism about colour experiences and colour thoughts that (I argue) colour objectivism requires. Externalists face the following question: would a subject’s wearing of inverting lenses eventually change the colour content of, for instance, those visual experiences the subject reports with “red”? From the work of Ned Block, David Velleman, Paul Boghossian, Michael Tye, and Fiona Macpherson, I extract a number of problems for each answer to this question. I show how these problems can be overcome, making externalism available to the colour objectivist.

The Location of Pains, Philosophical Papers, vol. 36, no. 2, July 2007, pp. 171-205. (11,000 words).

Perceptualists say that having a pain in a body part consists in perceiving the part as instantiating some property. I argue that perceptualism makes better sense of the connections between pain location and the experiences undergone by people in pain than three alternative accounts that dispense with perception. Turning to fellow perceptualists, I also reject ways in which David Armstrong and Michael Tye understand and motivate perceptualism, and I propose an alternative interpretation, one that vitiates a pair of objections—due to John Hyman—concerning the meaning of ‘Amy has a pain in her foot’ and the idea of bodily sensitivity. Perceptualism, I conclude, remains our best account of the location of pains.

Private Languages and Private Theorists, Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 216, July 2004, pp. 427-34. ISSN 0031-8094. (4,030 words).

Simon Blackburn objects that Wittgenstein’s private language argument overlooks the possibility of a private linguist equipping himself with a criterion of correctness by confirming generalisations about the patterns in which his private sensations occur. Crispin Wright responds that appropriate generalisations would be too few to be interesting. But I show that Wright’s calculations are upset by his failure to appreciate both the richness of the data and the range of theories that would be available to the linguist.

Intentionalism and Pain, Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 213, October 2003, pp. 502-523. ISSN 0031-8094. (10,000 words).

The pain case can appear to undermine the radically intentionalist view that the phenomenal character of any experience is entirely constituted by its representational content. That appearance is illusory, I argue. After categorising versions of pain intentionalism along two dimensions, I argue that an “objectivist” and “non-mentalist” version is the most promising, provided it can withstand two objections: concerning what we say when in pain, and the distinctiveness of the pain case. I rebut these objections, in a way that’s available to both opponents and adherents of the view that experiential content is entirely conceptual. In doing so I illuminate peculiarities of somatosensory perception that should interest even those who take a different view of pain experiences.