David Bain’s homepage

Department of Philosophy, University of Glasgow

69 Oakfield Avenue, Glasgow, G12 8QQ

United Kingdom

d.bain@philosophy.arts.gla.ac.uk

+ 44 (0)141 3308768

My publications and research interests are primarily in the philosophy of mind and language. See here for more on my research project and here for a biographical sketch. Go here for journalistic pieces and an explanation of what philosophy is for the uninitiated.

Publications

(Click blue titles to download.)

Articles

· “McDowell, Pain, and Subjectivism”, Philosophical Topics, forthcoming in vol. 37, no. 1, Spring 2009. (Draft only.) (13,660 words) It can seem natural to say both that, when in pain, we undergo experiences representing pains, and that the pains represented are dependent on being thus represented. Here I focus on McDowell’s neglected version of this view, developed as part of his general approach to mind and world. As well as registering worries about whether he can accommodate animal pain and the location of pains, I suggest that McDowell’s view may be viciously circular, and I object that his subjectivist conception of the subject-matter of pain experiences means that they cannot have the presentational, rationalising, and classificatory character McDowell thinks they have.

· “Colour, Externalism, and Switch Cases”, Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 45, no. 3, Fall 2007. (11,500 words). Abstract. I defend externalism about colour experiences and colour thoughts, which I argue colour objectivism requires. Externalists face the following question: would a subject’s wearing 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, leaving externalism available to the colour objectivist.

· “The Location of Pains”, Philosophical Papers, vol. 36, no. 2, July 2007, pp. 171-205. (11,000 words). [Philosophical Papers website here.] Abstract. 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). [Definitive version available here.] Abstract: 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). [Definitive version available here.] Abstract. 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.

Reviews

· “Review of Daniel Dennett. Reconciling Science and Our Self-Conception, by Matthew Elton”, Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 219, April 2005, pp. 369-371. ISSN 0031-8094. [Definitive version available here.]

Commissioned or Under Consideration

· “Review of Pain, edited by Murat Aydede”, Mind.

· “Review of Experience and the World’s Own Language, by Richard Gaskin”, Philosophical Quarterly.

Work in Progress

· “Revelation and Resemblance”

· “Bottom-Up Externalism: Colours, Shapes, and Microphysical Properties”

· “Pain, Itches, and Affordances”

· “Pain and the Fingertip Argument”

Biographical Sketch: A lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow since 2004, I have worked at the Universities of Oxford (1999-2000), Bristol (2000-2003), and Nottingham (2003-04). I started and finished my university education at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where I read for a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics during 1988-91, and a DPhil in philosophy during 1995-99, under the supervision of Bill Brewer and Bill Child. Between those stints in Oxford, I studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill during 1991-95, where I completed an MA, undertook preliminary doctoral work (under the supervision of Simon Blackburn), and taught, before returning to write my thesis in Oxford.

Current Research Interests: My current research project has a number of threads …

· No-content views of perceptual experience. I am interested in assessing these, locating them amongst other theories of experience, and exploring them particularly in the context of sensation (e.g. pain experience).

· Imperative views of sensation content. I think recently published versions of the view that sensation experiences have imperative content (see Richard Hall in AJP and Colin Klein in JPhil), e.g. “Scratch!”, are implausible. But I think some refinement of the idea may work, and may well have interesting connections with other notions philosophers have been interested in, e.g. affordances and intrinsically motivational beliefs and judgements (which are much discussed in, for example, metaethics). I think the view may also relate to distinctions that need to be drawn amongst different sorts of, for instance, pain behaviour, e.g. the intentional care directed at a hurting body part, on the one hand, and such expressive behaviour as a cry of “ouch”, on the other.

· Perceptual representation of colours, shapes, and diverse microphysical properties and kinds, such as temperatures, on the one hand, and water, on the other. Being an objectivist about colour, I think the fascinating differences amongst these cases—some of which the tradition attempts to capture in terms of one or other forms of the distinction between primary and second qualities—are differences not in respect of the objectivity of the properties in question, but rather in respect of how these properties are represented in perceptual experience, and how the experiences in which they are represented ground knowledge of, and the ability to think (in certain ways) about, those properties. Hence I am intereted in the following: the relations between externalist accounts of perceptual content and externalist accounts of thought content; context switch cases, particularly cases involving colour and shape properties; distinctions amongst different sorts of recognitional capacity; the scope of perceptual content and the relationship between perceptual content and phenomenal character; and the idea that the nature of certain properties—and relations of resemblance amongst them—are revealed to us in perceptual experience.