Quantitative Vignette Studies: t-Tests—Case Studies on Judgments About Unfelt Pains

What is pain? Perhaps surprisingly the standard answer to this question among philosophers does not derive from research in biology or other sciences but from claims about common sense and thought experiments intended to draw out our intuitions about the nature of pain. This raises a number of issues, among them the question of whether philosophers’ claims about the commonsense conception of pain are accurate. In this chapter, I’ll explore some of the empirical research that has been done on this question in recent years, focusing on the claim that common sense tells us that there can be no unfelt pains. In doing so, I’ll walk through several sets of studies, introducing the empirical research process and illustrating the use of one type of statistical tool—t-tests.