 The reason why this line was not pursued by indirect realists has probably something to do with the intuitive resistance against any perceptual view of pain already embedded in our ordinary conception that we discussed  above.[12]  Indirect realists like sense-datum theorists, as we have already seen, have the theoretical resources to accommodate the intuitive understanding of pain without forcing it into a perceptualist mold. Without any qualms, they can say that we are directly and immediately aware of pain qua a mental object or quality, whether or not this represents or signals tissue damage. This is to say that they already have a locus of concept application in their theory for the concept of pain: PAIN directly applies to the experience or to its internal direct object, i.e., to either a sense-datum or to its direct awareness. This seems to accommodate all the intuitions embedded in common sense; why go further? Furthermore, if one is not a perceptualist, one doesn’t have an obligation to deal with what we’ll call below the problem of focus, the problem of explaining why there is an asymmetry in conceptual focus between pain and standard exteroception if both are genuinely perceptual.