The Intentional Structure of Consciousness

Newcomers to the philosophy of mind are sometimes resistant to the idea that pain is a mental state. If asked to defend their view, they might say something like this: pain is a physical state, it is a state of the body. One feels a pain in one’s leg to be in the leg, not in the mind. After all, sometimes people distinguish pain which is ‘all in the mind’ from a genuine pain, sometimes because the second is ‘physical’ while the first is not. And we also distinguish mental pain (which is normally understood as some kind of emotional distress) from the physical pain one feels in one’s body.