Engineering the Concept of Pain for Clinical Practice

 

​Winner of the Canadian Philosophical Association's Nontenured Faculty Essay Prize, 2025​.

(Accepted at Ergo.)

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Abstract Conceptual engineering is often understood as the practice of assessing and improving our representational tools with specific aims in mind. In this paper, I contribute to the engineering of the concept of pain with a particular focus on clinical utility. My engineering efforts center on the International Association for the Study of Pain’s (IASP) “official” definition of pain, first introduced in 1979 and revised in 2020. I discuss the general process of conceptual engineering and the original IASP definition of pain and identify three desiderata for a definition suitable for clinical practice: it should be accurate, cognitively tractable, and promote justice in patient care. Evaluating the revised IASP definition against these desiderata, I argue that it is vague and fails to fully address persistent misconceptions about pain, and that additional revisions are therefore needed. I then propose an alternative definition engineered to better meet the demands of effective and just clinical practice.