Multimodal structure of painful experiences

It is common to characterize pain with touch-related terms, like ‘cutting’, ‘pressing’, ‘sharp’, and ‘pulsing’, or temperature-related terms, like ‘hot’ or ‘burning’. This suggests that many pains are phenomenally multimodal because they are experienced as having some tactile-like or thermal-like character. The goal of this chapter is to investigate the structure of phenomenally multimodal pain experiences. It is argued that the usual accounts of multimodal structure proposed in investigations regarding exteroceptive experiences cannot be plausibly applied to multimodal experiences of pain. Instead, an alternative framework is proposed which characterizes the structure of tactile-like and thermal-like pains by referring to the notion of crossmodal correspondences.