Polysemy and puzzles about pain
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21592051 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michelle Liu (0000-0003-4427-1235, Monash University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-28 |
| Publication date | 2026-07-07 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Philosophical Psychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0951-5089 • E-ISSN: 1465-394X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09515089.2026.2694541 |
| OpenAlex | W7167700456 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 46 |
Recent philosophical literature on pain has seen much discussion of puzzles which directly relate to how we ordinarily talk and think about pain. Using tools from theoretical and experimental linguistics, this paper provides an in-depth analysis of two types of locution about pain: predicative locutions (e.g. “My leg is hurting,” “I am hurting”), and locative locutions (e.g. “There is a pain in my leg”). Focusing on the paradox of pain and the pain-in-mouth puzzle, the paper shows that polysemy plays an important role in how we should diagnose these puzzles. The discussion here serves to illustrate that philosophical debates often go wrong because they ignore the fact that the terms under discussion are polysemous
Locative case · Philosophy of science · Polysemy · Predicative expression · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Pain Management and Placebo Effect · Philosophy and Theoretical Science
Doing without Concepts
The Concept of Mind
Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference
Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems
Pain, paradox and polysemy
How to Think about Zeugmatic Oddness
Is Pain “All in your Mind”? Examining the General Public’s Views of Pain
Polysemy and Philosophy
Polysemy, conjunction reduction, and copredication
Polysemy and thought
The polysemy view of pain
Polysemy
The polysemy of “I”
How to Be an Atomist Without Being an Externalist
Ambiguity Tests, Polysemy, and Copredication
On the grammar of pain
Unfelt pain
Mental Pictures and Cognitive Science
The Paradox of Pain
A Hole in the Box and a Pain in the Mouth
Towards a typology of pain predicates
Language and cultural influences in the description of pain
New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind
Semantic Underspecification in Language Processing
Pain Linguistics
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |