Pain Linguistics: A Case for Pluralism

Coninx, Sabrina; Willemsen, Pascale; Reuter, Kevin

doi:10.1093/pq/pqad048

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…While experiental studies on the folk concept of pain provide us with a better understanding of how laypeople think and communicate about pain, they might not solve the problem of parts for us. Not all folk concepts reveal strict necessary and sufficient conditions, and it must be the subject of further debate of whether the folk concept of pain does (Coninx et al, 2024;Salomons et al, 2022). 2 The previous considerations should instruct us to clearly state the definition of pain we presuppose to prevent misunderstandings.…”

Section: Problem Of Partsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, this debate concerns the folk concept of pain and requires a systematic investigation of exactly such folk concept. Yet, results from experimental philosophy speak against the assumption of a (single) folk concept of pain with a univocal meaning: people appear to treat pain as a mental as well as a bodily state (Borg et al, 2020(Borg et al, , 2021Coninx et al, 2024;Hill, 2005Hill, , 2017Liu, 2021Liu, , 2022Salomons et al, 2022). Thus, in referring to 'pain' in everyday life, we might denote a more complex episode involving at least two of the listed components.…”

Section: Problem Of Partsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Pain Philosophy: Recent Debates and Future Challenges

Coninx

2024

Philosophy Compass

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In the last decades, pain has moved more and more into the foreground of philosophical discussion. Still, there exists substantial disagreement concerning the exact nature of pain. The paper provides an overview concerning central topics in recent pain philosophy, indicating remaining challenges and outlining promising directions for future research. Starting point is the assumption that broadly constructed pain episodes are composed of at least four paradigmatic components: (a) physiological disturbance, (b) phenomenal experience (sensory + affective), (c) action tendency, and (d) alteration in a broader mental network. On that basis, the paper first addresses the challenge to fathom which of these components provides the necessary and sufficient condition for an episode being a pain episode. This involves discussions on the folk concept of pain as well as the closer examination of dissociative cases in which some components are apparently absent. Second, the paper addresses the challenge to define how the relevant components relate to each other, for example, how closely the phenomenal experience of pain is bound to the presence of a particular physiological disturbance or action tendency. This debate takes place mainly in the context of strong intentionalist theories—indicative, evaluative, and imperative. Third, the paper argues for the future development of a research program that centrally resolves around the challenges that chronic pain poses. This focus may open stronger interdisciplinary connections to clinical research and practice and advance considerations on topics that have so far received insufficient attention in pain philosophy (e.g., pain‐related suffering).

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Section: Problem Of Partsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Problem Of Partsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pain Philosophy: Recent Debates and Future Challenges

Coninx

2024

Philosophy Compass

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“…While most of the experimental work on the ordinary concept of causation features vignette-based studies, we instead use the cancellability test in this paper. Although the cancellability test is widely known in the philosophical and linguistic literature, it has only recently been applied to empirically investigating semantic-cum-pragmatic relations between concepts in philosophy (Willemsen & Reuter, 2021 ; Baumgartner et al, 2022 ; Coninx et al, 2023 ; Almeida et al, 2023 ). In the final section we then turn to potential objections, reporting the results of a fourth study testing a worry about our use of the cancellability test.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mutual entailment between causation and responsibility

Sytsma,

Willemsen,

Reuter

2023

Philos Stud

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The standard view in philosophy is that responsibility entails causation. Most philosophers treat this entailment claim as an evident insight into the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Further, it is taken to be equally obvious that the reversal of this claim does not hold: causation does not entail responsibility. In contrast, Sytsma and Livengood have put forward an account of the use of ordinary causal attributions (statements like “X caused Y”) that contends that they are typically used interchangeably with responsibility attributions (statements like “X is responsible for Y”). Put in terms of the concepts at play in these attributions, this account suggests that the reversal of the entailment claim may also hold, and, a fortiori, there would be mutual entailment between the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Using the cancellability test, we report the results of three pre-registered studies providing empirical evidence that causation and responsibility are mutually entailed by each other.

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“…This perspective makes the scientific study of pain challenging, to say the least. Three recent recommendations for understanding pain if there are no clear brain correlates include (1) promoting some version of eliminativism (Corns, 2020;Liu, 2023), (2) reviving multiple realizability and family resemblance models (Borg et al, 2021;Coninx, 2023;Coninx et al, 2023b;Serrahima and Martínez, 2023), and (3) suggesting an intersubjective or affordance-based approach (Oliver, 2022;Coninx et al, 2023a;Fulkerson, 2023).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Entangled brains and the experience of pains

Hardcastle

2024

Front. Psychol.

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The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) revised its definition of pain to “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience.” Three recent recommendations for understanding pain if there are no clear brain correlates include eliminativism, multiple realizability, and affordance-based approaches. I adumbrate a different path forward. Underlying each of the proposed approaches and the new IASP definition is the suspicion that there are no specific correlates for pain. I suggest that this basic assumption is misguided. As we learn more about brain function, it is becoming clear that many areas process many different types of information at the same time. In this study, I analogize how animal brains navigate in three-dimensional space with how the brain creates pain. Underlying both cases is a large-scale combinatorial system that feeds back on itself through a diversity of convergent and divergent bi-directional connections. Brains are not like combustion engines, with energy driving outputs via the structure of the machine, but are instead more like whirlpools, which are essentially dynamic patterns in some substrates. We should understand pain experiences as context-dependent, spatiotemporal trajectories that reflect heterogeneous, multiplex, and dynamically adaptive brain cells.

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Pain Linguistics: A Case for Pluralism

Cited by 6 publications

References 33 publications

Pain Philosophy: Recent Debates and Future Challenges

Pain Philosophy: Recent Debates and Future Challenges

Mutual entailment between causation and responsibility

Entangled brains and the experience of pains

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