Lunchtime Talk - Nina Atanasova 9/12/25 скачать в хорошем качестве

Lunchtime Talk - Nina Atanasova 9/12/25

Title: The Surreality of Pain Abstract: Throughout the reductionist debates of the twentieth-century philosophy of mind and science, non-reductionists often referred to pain as irreducible mental state par excellence. Notwithstanding, reductionists have remained unmoved in their conviction that mental states are exhaustively physical in nature. Pain eliminativism, arguably the most radical form of reductionism, has recently seen a revival in popularity (Baetu 2020, Corns 2020, Coninx 2021, Hardcastle 2024, Gligorov 2025). According to pain eliminativism, the commonsense notion of pain as an irreducible subjective experience is deeply flawed. Thus, it is to be eliminated from our vocabulary and replaced with the terms of a mature science of pain. The claim of eliminativism can be interpreted descriptively as a prediction of what happens when the science of pain matures. However, it can also be interpreted normatively as a prescription of what should happen when the science of pain matures. Considering that the science of pain has matured significantly since the early days of pain eliminativism (Dennett 1978), the renewed interest in the topic is not surprising. However, the verdicts on pain eliminativism delivered by different philosophers are often contradictory and inconclusive. I attribute much of the disagreement to the equivocation between predictive and prescriptive interpretations of eliminativism. In this talk, I aim to show that pain eliminativism has been successful predictively in the case of neuroscience pain education (NPE). NPE is an approach to chronic pain management that allows patients to reconceptualize pain from a sign of tissue damage to a functional/dysfunctional state of the nervous system. I argue that the success of this method suggests that pain eliminativism can be justified prescriptively in other contexts beyond the scope of science.