The possibility of imagining pain

In Imagined and delusional pain Jennifer Radden aims to show that experiences of pain – and in particular, the pain associated with depression – cannot be merely delusional. Her reasoning relies crucially on the claim that the feeling of pain is imaginatively beyond our reach. Though she thinks that there are many ways that one can imagine scenarios involving oneself being in pain, she argues that one cannot imagine the feeling of pain itself. In this commentary, I target this claim in an attempt to show that Radden is mistaken. My argument relies on facts about individual differences involving imagination. To my mind, arguments like Radden’s involve an unfortunate slide from an “I can’t imagine…” claim to an “It can’t be imagined claim…” To support my argument, I also call upon empirical findings concerning pain imagination. As I conclude, we have no reason to think that the feeling of pain is something that is, in principle, unimaginable.