Kim, Hyo-eun and Poth, Nina and Reuter, Kevin and Sytsma, Justin (2016) Where is your pain? A Cross-cultural Comparison of the Concept of Pain in Americans and South Korea. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Philosophical orthodoxy holds that pains are mental states, taking this to reflect the ordinary conception of pain. Despite this, evidence is mounting that English speakers do not tend to conceptualize pains in this way; rather, they tend to treat pains as being bodily states. We hypothesize that this is driven by two primary factors—the phenomenology of feeling pains and the surface grammar of pain reports. There is reason to expect that neither of these factors is culturally specific, however, and thus reason to expect that the empirical findings for English speakers will generalize to other cultures and other languages. In this article we begin to test this hypothesis, reporting the results of two cross-cultural studies comparing judgments about the location of referred pains (cases where the felt location of the pain diverges from the bodily damage) between two groups—Americans and South Koreans—that we might otherwise expect to differ in how they understand pains. In line with our predictions, we find that both groups tend to conceive of pains as bodily states.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Kim, Hyo-eun Poth, Nina Reuter, Kevin Sytsma, Justin
Additional Information:	Forthcoming in a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica on Mind and Folk Psychology edited by Bruno Mölder.
Keywords:	pain, concept of pain, semantics of pain, experimental philosophy, cross-cultural study, sound
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science Specific Sciences > Psychology
Depositing User:	Justin Sytsma
Date Deposited:	10 Mar 2016 21:48
Last Modified:	10 Mar 2016 21:48
Item ID:	11964
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science Specific Sciences > Psychology
Date:	10 March 2016
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/11964

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