Pain, Injury and First/Third-Person Asymmetry

Abstract

Philosophers are wont to say that certain concepts, e.g., the concept of exhibit 'first/third-person asymmetry', whereas others, e.g., the concept of injury, do not.2 (That is, they claim that the 'logic' of, say, am in works very differently from that of He is in pain, whereas there is no such asymmetry between, say, am injured and He is injured.) The question I wish to address here concerns the status of such claims. They are commonly seen as nothing more than summary reports of how the relevant words (e.g., 'pain', 'injury') are ordinarily used: as statements of 'grammatical fact'. I want to argue against this view of their status. I will suggest that philosophers who put forward such 'asymmetry claims' do not simply report ordinary usage, they in effect evaluate it. E.g., some perfectly ordinary locutions are actually prima facie incompatible with their claims, but they dismiss these locutions as 'misleading' or 'unhappy'. It is possible to motivate a different set of asymmetry claims, according to which the concept of pain looks rather less first/third-person asymmetrical, and the concept of injury rather more so, than on the usual view. These alternative asymmetry claims 'fit' the standardly problematic 'facts of ordinary usage' better than the standard asymmetry claims. But the point is not to suggest that these alternative asymmetry claims actually have the status which many