# Distinguishing the Appearance from the Reality of Pain **Abstract:** It is often held that it is conceptually impossible to distinguish between a pain and a pain experience. In this article I present an argument which concludes that people make this distinction. I have done a web-based statistical analysis which is at the core of this argument. It shows that the intensity of pain has a decisive effect on whether people say that they ‘feel a pain’(lower intensities) or ‘have a pain’ (greater intensities). This ‘intensity effect’ can be best explained by people’s varying confidence about their pain, and indicates that ‘feeling pain’ can be identified as introspective report and ‘having pain’ as an objective statement — analogous to the traditional sense modalities. However, if people have the ability to make both introspective and objective statements about pain, then it seems indeed the case that they distinguish the appearance from the reality of pain. Many philosophers claim that there is a tension between the semantic properties of pain expressions and the conceptual role of pain (Bain, 2007; Hill, 2006). On the one hand, we ascribe pains to specific locations in or on the body (‘I have a pain in my stomach’) as if they were external to the mind, on the other hand, our analysis of the concept of pain seems to reveal that there is no distinction between the appearance and the reality of pain, i.e. a person who feels a pain, really has a pain. In this paper I present an argument which demonstrates that people use expressions of pain in a way w **Authors:** [[Reuter]]