 The main source of resistance to a perceptual view of pain comes from the common-sense conception of pain according to which pains are sensations with essential privacy, subjectivity, self-intimation, and incorrigibility. These apparently essential features of pains pose difficulties for any perceptual theory. Indeed, they can be used in advancing anti-perceptualist arguments whose general form can be put in the following way. Genuine perception always involves the possibility of misperceiving the perceptual object that is not essentially private and subjective. In other words, there is always an appearance/reality distinction applicable to the objects of genuine perception which gives rise to the possibility that the perceptual appearance of this object misleads us about what the object is like in reality. The main reason for this is that these objects have a reality beyond their appearances. They are thus public objects and capable of existing on their own without anyone’s perception of them. But feeling pain has none of these features. Therefore, it cannot be genuine perception.