L’esperienza del dolore. Modelli concettuali a confronto

In this paper I discuss the theme concerning the experience of pain by comparing three different theoretical perspectives: the cognitivist and reductionist approach most widely adopted at present within the neuro-sciences, as it is offered by P. and P. Churchland’s works; the hermeneutical approach offered by H.-G. Gadamer’s reflection; finally, a possible phenomenological conception grounded on E. Husserl’s and M. Scheler’s theses. The paper aims to show, through a discussion of the present-day evaluation and measurement methods of subjective experience of pain and its objectivation by means of questionnaires (McGill Pain Questionnaire), that in order to adequately understand, from a medical and philosophical standpoint, the complexity of painful experience, it is necessary to avoid a reductionist approach, and to open the investigation to the subjective structure, at the same time avoiding falling back into dualism derived by an opposition between physical explanation and hermeneutical understanding. While therefore the eliminativist and reductionist approach fails to make room for the subjectivity of painful experience, and Gadamer’s hermeneutics remains without knowing it within Cartesian dualism, phenomenology seems to be able to open up a path towards the experience of felt/feeling corporeity, seen as a structural basis for an incarnated yet non-reductionist conception of bodily suffering.