Polysemy and puzzles about pain

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.