 But does the scientific trend towards understanding pain as a subjective experience less like a perception and more like an emotion with quite a variable link to injurious stimuli undermine the philosophical project? There is no simple answer. We may say, “yes it does,” if we take the perceptual/representational theories as making the strong claim that pain is strictly nothing but a perception just like other standard perceptions. We may say, “no it doesn’t” if we take their claim in a weaker sense to the effect that pain involves some form of perception understood in a certain way (on the assumption that the perceptualists can answer other arguments against their views, such as the argument from focus). Nothing in the scientific understanding of pain by itself seems to show that pain involves no sensory perception at all. On the contrary, as the science of pain has unearthed in the last fifty years or so, there are relatively specialized systems that process noxious stimuli from the moment they affect peripheral receptors to the central processing of these signals in the spinal cord and the brain.