Borg, E., Harrison, R., Stazicker, J. & Salomons, T. (2020). Is the folk concept of pain polyeidic? Mind & Language 35(1), 29–47 (online 3 February 2019). DOI 10.1111/mila.12227. Read from the revise-and-resubmit manuscript in CentAUR (University of Reading), item 79706.
Key takeaways
From the reading, NOTE-994.
- The target. The “Bodily view”: the folk hold that pains have bodily locations and are “not in the mind”, because participants allow shared pains, unfelt pains and hallucinated pains (Sytsma 2010; Reuter, Phillips & Sytsma 2014).
- Four methodological objections. The samples are small and partly recruited online. Every vignette concerns acute pain, while chronic, diffuse pain fits the view poorly. “Is the pain in his mind?” is likely heard as “is it imagined?”. And the means are close to the neutral point (3.29 and 3.42 for shared pain; 5.4 for two pains in the three-legged race).
- Two structural objections. Denying pains the Cartesian marks is consistent with a non-Cartesian mental view, which Sytsma & Reuter (2018) concede. And from “folk respond in bodily ways” only “the folk conception of pain is (at least in part) Bodily” follows.
- Counter-evidence, pilot only. In vignettes where damage never hurt, participants disagreed that the person “has pain” (means 5.70 and 5.79, where 7 is “clearly disagree”). The details are deferred to an unpublished manuscript, and no sample size is given.
- The polyeidic view. The folk concept is an amalgam of dimensions that “can conflict”, on which subjects hold “latent positions” that are “subject to framing effects” and have “behavioural effects”. It is offered as a programme. The paper prefers, provisionally, single scales between poles over separate dimensions.
- Clinical hypothesis. Patients and clinicians may weight the experiential and the bodily dimensions differently, which would explain part of the difficulty they have in communicating about chronic pain.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-20 at the owner’s request, in a round of experimental work near the rubber hand illusion. It is a philosophical critique of strict-sense experimental philosophy, with a little pilot data of its own. Read in full from a pre-acceptance manuscript: Active.
It does not bear on THEORY-766, THEORY-769, THEORY-767, THEORY-768 or THEORY-458. It is about the concept of pain, not about ownership, felt location under multisensory conflict, or interoceptive signals. Its footnotes on referred and phantom pain touch the topic of felt location, and the NOTE says why that is not evidence for or against THEORY-766’s referred-touch clause.
Its place is with the record’s holdings on pain, affect and phenomenal consciousness. Its affective, aversive and motivational dimensions sit beside THEORY-045’s claim that felt affect, pain included, is the experience of the body’s regulatory state. It does not test that claim. For QUESTION-048 it is a reminder, from inside the x-phi literature, that judgements about a concept move with how the question is asked, and that they are not evidence about the experience.
Read against Reuter, Sienhold & Sytsma (2019), filed in the same round (LIT-1278), one of the bodily-view papers it opposes. It names that paper’s authors and cites it, but does not discuss its pain-in-mouth argument. Each paper uses conversational implicature as its tool. Reuter et al. use it to explain away the intuition that pain is not spatially in the mouth. Borg et al. use it to explain away the bodily view’s “not in the mind” answers.