In general, it is risky for ordinary language philosophers to correct ordinary language as misleading; and a case can be made that pain is as intentional as any other mental experience. Part of the challenge is that a random hallucination of yellow is less attention focusing and more sensible than a random hallucination of pain. People do not generally hallucinate pains – except for pains experienced in phantom limbs of amputees as well as those born without limbs. A hallucination of pain is still painful – but there is no organic damage to a local site. A hallucination is defined as an experience for which there is no ordinary causal account, requiring an explanation in terms of the exceptional processing of the sensory (perceptual) system itself. It is the self-stimulation of the nervous, visual, auditory, tactile system in the absence of the ordinary artifacts of experience. Thus, a perceptual mechanism of object constancy causes various optical illusions – hallucinations – as rail road-tracks converge at the horizon. The phantom limb is the self-stimulation of the body image used to navigate and manage the organism’s trajectory through the environment. (See R. Melzack. (1973). The Puzzle of Pain) Phantom limb pain is a type of hallucination. If not, it is hard to say what would count as one. There is damage in abundance, too, as a limb is missing, although the trauma may or may not be remembered. So even if the individual with the pain in his phantom limb is not having an intentional experience, one can empathize with his pain and the act of empathy with his pain is indeed an intentional act. The pains and paralysis of classic hysteria were also arguably hallucinatory, at least in the sense that there was no organic lesion.

However, in order to get to the issues crucial to empathy and intentionality, the line of least resistance is to allow the objection tentatively and for the sake of discussion. Even if one allows that “He is in pain” is not intentional, such is not the case with the empathically based assertion “I feel that he is in pain.” “I feel that he is in pain” is an entirely different assertion and one indeed intentional. Why? The introduction of the other in addition to oneself and this other being in pain is sufficient to activate the vicarious representation of pain in the empathizing subject.

Do you happen to know if ostensive teaching is something of teacher’s jargon or something that is more of philosophical interest?

Thanks!

http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-religion.aspx

Plus the essay re Reality & The Middle via this page.

http://www.dabase.org/s-atruth.htm

Thanks.