Last updated: Sun, Aug 25, 2024
Cognitive scientists have come to believe that we possess a modular set of cognitive faculties. This is based on a range of evidence, from neuroscientific brain-mapping techniques to cognitive experiments conducted in psychology labs. It isn't clearly understood to what extent these modules of cognition are genetically determined or developed in early learning. There is so far no firm agreement as to the specific identities and functions of these modules. What is agreed is that we all share these modules, and that we use them intuitively.
Steven Pinker, in his 2002 book, "The Blank Slate," provided a list of intuitive faculties that he felt were "defensible" at that time. His list includes:1
In calling these faculties "intuitive," it is meant that these faculties are used without effort and without awareness, unconsciously. We have to work to learn alternative ways to think about any of these subjects. Recall algebra and geometry classes, which are painfully difficult for many. Statistical training is even more difficult. Study of English literature is in part a refining and remolding of our use and understanding of language.
A few of these innate and intuitive faculties are particularly relevant to understandings of pain. We use our intuitive psychology (alongside or underneath other learnings) to understand other people. A central intuition of this psychology is that people behave not randomly or according to fixed programs, but at the urging of an internal and invisible entity that we call "mind" or "soul" or various other names. Minds contain beliefs and desires, and they are, by this theory, the direct cause of human behavior. This idea is so central to our social beliefs that it is illustrated in the book of Genesis, when God breathes his spirit into dust to create man.
Our intuitive psychology suggests to us that mind and matter are separate. In our intuitive physics, events have causes, while in our intuitive psychology, events have reasons and motivations. Steven Pinker suggests that "Our theory of soul may emerge from the combination of our empathy (others have desires and goals) and our ‘natural’ theory of mind."2
Patrick Wall in 2000 commented: "If I tell someone I am concerned with the problem of pain, they frequently ask me whether I mean physical pain or mental pain. That question expresses the dualism of our culture. If I say, 'My foot hurts me,' I express the dualism of my thinking...."3 It appears that the categories we intuitively use when thinking about ourselves and others may seep more generally into our thinking about deep philosophical questions.
Our intuitive psychology sees human behavior as motivated rather than constrained. It suggests or at least allows the idea that, since we are also self-aware, we are in control of our own behavior. It is not a complete psychology by any means, and has been extended or enhanced by theologians and philosophers over the millennia. (See Ideological Understandings for a little more about this.)
Intuitive thinking about morality wasn't included in Pinker's 2002 list, but there is both cognitive and anthropological evidence of an intuitive basic moral sense. Research on humans, but also on other social mammals, and even on certain birds, shows signs of awareness of what we humans call moral issues. Any animal that lives socially faces the problem of equity at the same time it faces the problem of scarcity. Each individual in a society has to be aware of how others' behaviors affect their own access to resources, and so each individual must deal with other members' reactions to their own behaviors. This is the evolutionary or adaptive thinking behind the moral sense.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has defined four families of social emotions that comprise the moral sense:4
Haidt also identified three concerns that cut across the four families:
These social emotions are both intuitive and strong, and the strength of the actions they can evoke suggests that the moral intuition is not always a good guide to behavior. The confusion of purity with divinity allows segregation and oppression against others who can be deemed impure. Anger excuses or facilitates violence. Embarrassment is like deference to power, which is like respect for authority, which reinforces deference to power and confuses moral worth with the ability to grant or withhold benefits and punishments. Morality is easily confounded with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and even attractiveness.
“People...feel justified in invoking divine retribution or the coercive power of the state to enact the punishments [for acts they deem immoral]....Our moral sense licenses aggression against others as a way to prevent or punish immoral acts.”5 Couple this sense of licensed aggression with our often loose grip on understanding, and there is a high potential for harm stemming from moral passion. This potential is higher when facts are obscure, as in chronic pain. (See Deception and Self-deception for views on the reliability of our understanding.)
Another area in which intuitive understandings have been attested is in exchange relationships. Anthropologist Alan Fiske has identified four different "modes of exchange" that seem to be universally understood by humans.6 These are:
Each of these modes has its own proper place, and each has its attendant psychology. Like Haidt's dimensions of the intuitive moral sense, these intuitive and perhaps innate modes of exchange point to the adaptive importance of issues related to social cooperation and social competition. Pain is broadly seen as an issue of social cooperation and social competition, as discussed in Folk or Cultural Understandings. Hence, it might be expected that attitudes surrounding these issues would be emotionally charged whether or not they were well thought through. The relationships between patients and care providers exist in a sort of limbo of exchange modes, some aspects of which will be discussed in Structural Features of the Medical System and Pain Medicine.