ABSTRACT
This chapter focusses on currently dominant models of pain from pain science. Beginning with the revolution in pain science in the 1960s, pain science has come into greater alignment with everyday theory in recognising pain to be a multidimensional experience that paradigmatically includes sensation, perception, emotion, cognition, and motivational responses. This multidimensionality is enshrined in all leading scientific models of pain including gate-control theory, D.D. Price’s somatic perception theory, A.D. Craig’s homeostatic theory, and the neuromatrix theory for pain. I argue, however, that none of these models identify a mechanism which adequately explains pain. Extant research on pain types reveals that some mechanisms are involved in some pains and not others, and, moreover, each token pain results from the idiosyncratic convergent activation of multiple mechanisms. This idiosyncrasy is crucial for explaining pain tokens, but it blocks successful mechanistic explanations about pain types or pain as such. The overall conclusion argued for in this chapter is thus that each token pain is determined by the idiosyncratic convergence of the activity of multiple mechanisms. This claim is dubbed the complex idiosyncrasy of pain.
