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“Valence” as an English Translation of “Vedanā”

Perhaps.

Some dharma teachers claim there is no English equivalent for the Pāli “vedanā” . Although I do not know a word in common usage, there has been a word used in psychology since the 1930s, “valence”, that I think will do the job very well. [1]

In (the HIGHLY recommended) How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett offers a simple definition of valence: “how pleasant or unpleasant you feel”. [2] Isn’t that pretty much it?

Any single word cannot be mapped precisely from one language/culture to another. The connotations and connections, the cloud of meaning surrounding the Pāli “vedanā”, do not precisely match the English “valence”. If you tug on “vedanā”, “Paṭiccasamuppāda” (Dependent Arising) comes with it. If you tug on “valence”, “affect” comes with it. This is just how translation works. And yet, it seems to me these two words are pointing towards the same phenomenon, the hedonic (pleasant to unpleasant) flavor of human experience.

Your thoughts?

[1] Quick history lesson: Kurt Lewin, a German-American psychologist, used the German term “Valenz” which was translated into the English “Valence”. Possible first English publication using the term was his A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935.

[2] If you prefer more complicated definitions, the American Psychological Association’s Dictionary of Psychology can scratch that itch.

9 replies on ““Valence” as an English Translation of “Vedanā””

Hello, Patty! Care to elucidate? Is this something you’ve worked on already?

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I’m all for finding English substitutes for Pali words. Yes! Yes! Yes! Even if we concoct them from English root words.

Please don’t be mad at me that “valence” doesn’t ring my bell, except as a curtain.

I’m tempted to worplay “hedonic,” except that it has negative connotations.

Until something sexier comes along, I can be content with “feeling tone.”

Shannon, please know that I’m usually on the wrong side of public opinion polls. So, my discomfort with “valance” probably means that it’s a winner!!

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Hmm. Interesting. I don’t “like” valence either, as I first learned the word in the context of atomic theory (physics). So having the word also symbolize something about affect seems odd to me. I actually resisted the word for a few years and clung to Weber’s “Hedonic Tone”.

But if I may offer: it’s not about whether one “likes” a particular use case as much as pointing out that it is, in fact, a use case that may be a cognate for vedanā. When dhamma teachers say “there is no English word for vedanā” I wish to point them towards this psychological concept of valence.

My aim is to help dhamma and cogsci talk to each other. :)

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Hi,

I just came across this by searching “is Valence a translation of Vedana?”, having read (again) pages 72 and 73 of Feldman Barrett’s amazing book.

Having thought about it slightly further, and read on a few pages, it strikes me that maybe it’s not worth trying to equate the two in terms of the one being a translation of the other, but rather see them as (perhaps very) overlapping constructs intended to serve different purposes. Valence as a scientific construct that denotes how interoception shows up in consciousness along with arousal. And Vedana as focus of contemplation with a view to reducing reactivity and progressively developing detachment. Both are a fundamental and continuous parts of human experience, both as parts of psychological functioning that underlie human reaction to our immediate context. Both are only conscious if we pay due attention.

This feels like it allows the two terms to be distinct, to serve their different purposes, and not to need conflating in a way that may inadvertently become reductive. But definitely useful to consider alongside each other.

What do you think?

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Dear Alastair, thanks for your patience; I was on 30-days retreat and just now catching up with correspondence. :)

I think you make an excellent point. The two terms are not one-to-one correlations.

But isn’t this just a function of how translation works? I mean, isn’t this just how _words_ work? In a Linguistics course I took at university, the professor asked, “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” Half the class were adamant it was not, half the class were okay that it was. And this is not even translation. (A hot dog is most definitely _not_ a sandwich, by the way. ;)

This may be a stale subject for you, but if you’re up for it, what would you propose instead of “valence”? :)))

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Hi Shannon, great that you’ve had a month long retreat. It’s not a stale subject IMO!

A couple of thoughts. I think overally slight reticence is that giving (primarily) scientific terms as translations to Pali word risks taking them (albeit sometimes subtly) in a different direction, shutting off some connotations and opening up others. If we offer one scientific term as a direct translation it risks a lack of curiosity about the multiple possible functional implications of the original Pali word. Words do things, and *what* they do (and don’t do) matters from the point of view of the multiple meanings they create.

Hence many writers not translating the word dukkha or nibbana anymore – there’s just no satisfactory translation that respects their original intended meaning.

What I love about Pali terms is that many of them have a whole paradigm or metaphorical implication to them, which their close English equivalents don’t (or have lost in modern use). Keeping the words in Pali keeps me curious about these.

So for me, it’s not that Valence isn’t a helpful term to be thinking about in relation to Vedana. It’s that if it becomes the translation, it might overly sanitise or make scientific (or secularise) it. I’m probably being way too wary about a term that doesn’t appear to have the same nuance or multiplicity as dukkha or nibbana, but that’s just what comes to mind!

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Great! I think I agree very much, particularly around the nuance of the Pāli, of discovering how the word Vedanā is used in the discourses, and trying to get a sense of how that concept fits in with Gotama’s teachings. (I’m thinking here of these last two posts on conceptual chunking…)

A few things:

1. For dhamma dorks (if you don’t consider yourself a dhamma dork, please excuse me. It’s a term I use with great affection) I think you are absolutely correct. I would never use any term other than Vedanā.

2. Classically Vedanā has been translated as “feeling”, which I think is quite misleading. If we _are_ going to translate it I’d like to find something else.

3. I’m very interested in discourse with non-dhamma-dorks. (My BooBear, for example. My parents. My uber driver.) My sense thus far is that for many of these folk, Pāli can be an enormous turn off. I think of the English words available, Valence is the best I’ve found so far.

4. When I hear dhamma teachers say there is no English translation for Vedanā, I think that’s misleading. At least as much as any word can be translated (including translations between modern languages), I think Valence is a pretty good fit, recognizing the caveats of translation as a troublesome pursuit in the first place.

So yes! I agree. But also I think there is room for valence. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

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