Abstract
This article explores the concept of ‘pain’ and the relation between abstract, detached knowledge and patient experiences and ‘first person perspectives’. Pain can be handled as the correlate of a neurological finding (for example in a professional practice) and as an experience in a patient’s life. Sometimes patients articulate experiences impossible to link to an objective trace. In such situations it is often claimed that we are left with a choice between dealing with pain and suffering as abstract, detached public conceptions or as private inaccessible entities. In this paper I argue that this is an unappetizing choice, and that we can develop a better understanding of ‘first person perspectives’ if we look at them in the light of contexts, stories and practices regulated by public exemplars. Discourses for handling pain as a phenomenon in a person’s life exist, and it is an epistemological as well as a normative problem if such perspectives are not recognized. The argument is elaborated through a discussion of, amongst others, Martha Nussbaum, Marx Wartofsky, Amartya Sen, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
