Defining Pain: Natural Semantic Metalanguage Meets IASP: A Comment on Wierzbicka’s “Is Pain a Human Universal? A Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Perspective on Pain”

Abstract

When it comes to communication of pain, Anna Wierzbicka (2012) takes issue with the scientific definition of pain and turns to natural semantic metalanguage (NSM). However, "pain" is not one of the 64 semantic primes in NSM, and therefore Wierzbicka suggests words such as "body," "bad," and "don't want." This blurs the boundaries between pain and other aversive sensations and it also challenges certain clinical features of the pain experience.

Pain: Universal but Culturally Shaped

“…It is also greatly encouraging to see that in Devon Hinton’s (2012) view, the use of NSM allows us to improve on the widely used McGill Pain Questionnaire and that the NSM analysis of “pain” is “a key beginning” for a fruitful interdisciplinary exploration of this vital area of human experience. Ephrem Fernandez’s (2012) spirited defense of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) definition of “pain” highlights different disciplinary perspectives on pain and thus helps along interdisciplinary dialogue.…”

“…Fernandez’s (2012) interesting commentary highlights the need for a more comprehensive discussion of four methodological issues. The first one concerns the distinction between ordinary meaning of words and their technical meaning, for example, between “pain” in normal usage and what Fernandez calls “pain defined scientifically” (2012, p. xxx).…”

“…The second issue concerns the role of prototypes in definitions. The definition of “pain” that was put forward in the target article does not imply that “pain involves concurrent tissue damage and unpleasant feeling,” but only that something like “tissue damage” (Fernandez, 2012, p. xxx) (combined with feeling something bad in a part of the body) provides a conceptual reference point for the “naive” concept of pain. This is why “bad feelings” like nausea and other “aversive sensations” are not regarded by speakers as pain: they do not fit the prototype which is encoded in the ordinary meaning of the word pain .…”

“…The third issue concerns the number of universal concepts. Fernandez (2012, p. xxx) says that “NSM has only 60 or so words, many of which do not mirror universal concepts.” He doesn’t say, though, which of the NSM primes he thinks do not mirror universal concepts or why. The NSM set of universal semantic primes is based on many years of systematic cross-linguistic investigations and is supported by extensive empirical evidence (which is publicly available in NSM publications).…”

“…In the same context, Fernandez (2012, p. xxx) asks about the concepts “birth,” “mother,” “father,” and “child” which he calls “Jungian archetypes” and which, he points out, are “conspicuously missing” from the NSM list of primes. Empirical evidence suggests that three of these four are indeed universal human concepts: in all languages we find “mother,” “father,” and “to be born” (the relational concept “child of .…”