Coninx, Sabrina and Willemsen, Pascale and Reuter, Kevin
(2022)
Pain Linguistics: A Case for Pluralism.
[Preprint]
Abstract
The most common approach to understanding the semantics of the concept of pain are third-person thought experiments. By contrast, the most frequent and most relevant use of the folk concept of pain concerns a first-person perspective in conversational settings. In this paper, we use a set of linguistic tools to systematically explore the semantics of what people communicate when reporting pain from a first-person perspective. Our results suggest that only a pluralistic view can do justice to the way we talk about pain: The semantic content of the folk concept of pain consists of information about both an unpleasant feeling and a disruptive bodily state. Pain linguistics thus provides an interesting challenge to the dominant unitary views of pain, as well as new insights into ordinary pain language.
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