PERSON CONCEPTS

by F. Richard Singer III Edition date: 7/2010

This paper and other referred to using CPCS can be downloaded from conceptualstudy.org

Abstract: This is a purely conceptual paper. It develops some distinctions that can be used to compare and contrast individuals who most people clearly consider as persons with those individuals who engage in somewhat person-like behaviors. It focuses on a functional person concept, giving a rationale for taking it as the primary a person concept. This functional person concept is based on behavioral histories rather than on attributes, such as having an immortal soul, altho I begin with this attribute concept because it seems to be favored by more persons. Hopefully I can make a case for a functional concept as the more useful one for public purposes, while still remaining sensitive to those who think in terms of the concept of a soul. A paradigm case formulation of this functional concept is given that is close to the one suggested in Descriptive Psychology, but which gives a more complex list of transformation to add cases of persons that Descriptive Psychology might find questionable. This paradigm case formulation uses the concept of a dramaturgical pattern. That concept is discussed in terms of the concept of subjective consciousness formulated by Julian Jaynes. Some of the transformations are expansive i.e. they specify further types of individuals who engage person-like behavior but who neither Descriptive Psychology nor I would classify as persons, as they have behavior potential that is far too limited for them to be so classified. Some of these clearly exist (such as domestic dogs), and perhaps thinking about the extent to which their behavior is person-like could be of interest to some people. One of reason in formulating person-like concepts is to consider how and why Homo sapiens became persons. In particular, this is related to Jaynes’ concept of bicameral man, altho I make no claim that his account is correct

Terminology: Altho some terms (such as ‘quasi-person’ and ‘personoid’) are used, these are only being proposed as a way of focusing on concepts while considering them in this paper.

Nets: This paper occasionally uses some epistemic concepts and terminology. The term ‘net’ denotes a network of conceptual distinctions and conceptual relationships that can be used to think about some realm of interest; perhaps to obtain or organize information about it, to propose conjectures about it, to suggest questions about it, etc. Conceptual statements are about concepts and relationships between concepts in some net. Paraceptual statements presuppose some net. They are intended to propose information about some particular aspects of some realm that the net is intended to help access. A concept is essential for a net if it permeates a person’s thinking about its realm of interest, giving coherence to the way the person regards many aspects of the net. A person’s routine net is the one whose realm of interest includes that person’s ordinary routine activities. A concept is crucial for a person if that person’s routine net and behavior in relation to that net would be incoherent without it. For instance, the concept of a person is crucial for me. For more details see my book entitled A Personal Approach to Conceptual Philosophy on the Conceptual Philosophy Section of my website.

That we have the net designated as Descriptive Psychology is due to Peter Ossorio. Since this net is used in similar ways by a number of people and is designed for use by the public, it will be referred to as PNDP (Public Net for Descriptive Psychology). The realm of interest for PNDP is potentially everything involving persons, as is much of our routine net. Thus, a person concept is crucial. My paradigm case formulation of a functional person concept was largely influenced by Ossorio (1998a) and Ossorio (2006a). Closely related to the person concept are other essential concepts, such as the person characteristics and behavior description concepts. Since these concepts are primarily a more systematic version of what the ordinary connotations of these terms suggest, they are only briefly sketched in the body of this paper.

Having Concepts: Altho concepts may seem dependent on language, this may be primarily due to the way we discuss-analyze-formulate them. This is not how we usually acquire concepts. They are mainly acquired thru usage other than discussion and analysis, and we recognize that P has a concept when P can act on it. If P routinely stops on red then saying that P has a traffic light concept seems reasonable. P may understand the concept of a traffic light without knowing what it is called, altho because language plays such a major role in our lives, some term for it is likely to be known by P. Moreover, if P calls it a traffic light but never stops on red we may reasonably doubt that P has the concept of traffic light. Having locutions for concepts is useful for many reasons. This allows us to bring concepts into focus, make implicit concepts more explicit, refine concepts, relate them to other concepts, recognize nuances, see new distinctions, appreciate further applications, and of course especially to communicate using them.

In many cases, it is an oversimplification to think of an individual as either mastering or not mastering a specific concept. If a normal person P also routinely stops on green to check for cross traffic then P probably has a limited mastery of the concept of a traffic light or an unusual history. There are various parameters that can be used to think about mastering a concept. These are developed in CPCS Concept Parameters. The integration parameter indicates the understanding an individual has of the relationship that a concept has to other concepts. This is extremely important for developing a deeper mastery of our crucial concepts, since they permeate our thinking. To say that they are crucial only means that some version of them is essential for the net that includes all of that person’s nets. It does not mean that all of their relationships must be understood.

Non-functional Person Concepts: Having a soul that can survive bio-death is something that many people have associated with being a person. Many people have a strong commitment to beliefs that humans are created in the image of God and that God imbues a fertilized egg with such a soul. Many others believe in a soul that passes thru many reincarnations. To be widely used, a person concept needs to take account of such sensibilities. Yet the functional person concept makes no use of the concept of a soul and at first glance it might seem to deny the existence of the souls. However I want to stress that being a concept, it neither affirms nor denies the existence of anything. Instead it leaves questions about the souls as a paraceptual matter, about which there is considerable disagreement. Unlike having a history of some type of action, having a soul is a kind of attribute. Ontological disagreements make the use of a person concept based on an immortal soul unsuitable as the primary person concept in a routine multicultural public net. However, there is no necessary reason that people with different cosmic versions cannot use a shared net. A functional person concept is intended for use in a shared net that would also include the concept of a person whose existence is not bound to terminate. Using such a concept makes no ontological commitments. Whether such persons exist is a paraceptual issue.

The belief in the existence of persons who survive death is widespread. Many traditional theists believe that only humans do so. They might prefer restricting the term ‘person’ for individuals with a soul, altho they would probably also agree that persons have the kind of behavioral features given in the paradigm case formulation of the functional person concept. They could then always deny that robots can have souls, because calling a robot with the behavior potential of a person does not entail giving a robot the same status as a person with a soul. For an inclusive public net, it would seem better not to restrict ‘person’ to individuals with souls since there is a lack of consensus on how to determine which individuals have souls. A believer in reincarnation might claim that animals do. A physicalist would claim that there are no individuals with souls. People with these different cosmic versions might even all agree that a robot who satisfied the behavioral features for being a person did not have a soul, but there would not be a consensus on how this was determined. Moreover, a person without a cosmic version might remain undecided about the soul of a robot who could function as a human. Radically different beliefs about how we can know are involved. An inclusive public net cannot depend on special epistemological or ontological beliefs. A net having a person concept that allows for classifying an individual as a person on fairly wide functional and potential functional grounds should not have this problem. Of course using any concept to communicate does depend on a consensus on some fairly ordinary basic reliable knowledge. Conceptual considerations are only tools for bringing concerns into focus. Moreover, how well these tools are used is a matter of competence.

Altho locutions do not necessarily determine status, they often seem to. Thus people tend to prefer certain locutions, sometimes so strongly that they are unwilling to compromise on them. They may feel that giving up on the locution is to weaken status. Consider the locution ‘human life’. I would prefer to use a concept in which the status human was assigned by the consensus of humankind. This involves a problem. Altho there may be enough of a consensus (at least in our culture) to definitely assign human status after birth, there is no consensus on an earlier assignment. I deal with this by conceptualizing the status human broadly to include both unborn humans and born human. Each status is assigned on the basis of criteria with few borderline cases. This choice seems to correspond to a major division in ethical concerns. To have human status makes P’s wellbeing eligible for ethical concerns. For many people, this makes the concern for the unborn as important as the ethical concern involved for any other human. However for others the status of born human plays a special role making the wellbeing of born humans more important than that of unborn humans. However it is the status that is the issue, and any issue as to locutions needs to be settled by compromise if miscommunication is to be avoided. Appendix 2 illustrates how a term like ‘eternal person’ might be useful in regard to more effective communication, and hopefully why the broader functional use of the term ‘person’ need not be offensive to those with theistic beliefs.

Intentional Action: To formulate a functional person concept it is useful to formulate the concept of intentional action and to distinguish a special case of it which will be designated as optional action. Roughly speaking intentional action involves doing something that is intended (at least implicitly) to satisfy some want. More precisely intentional action is behavior that can be described using the parameters below. These parameters are taken from things we might ordinarily say in talking about something an individual did, as will be illustrated in Appendix 3. Of course our ordinary descriptions are likely to be less systematic and indicate only feature of interest for the purposes at hand. The paradigm case of a behavior description uses all of the parameters below to describe a course of action X by an individual called the actor. The person giving the description is called the observer. The observer and actor can be the same person.

¨ Identity (I) specifies the actor A for X.

¨ Wanting (W) indicates what A intends to achieve by X.

¨ Knowledge (K) has to do with what A knows and uses in relation to X.

¨ Know-how (KH) has to do with the competencies A displays relation to X.

¨ Performance (P) encompasses the processes that A is implementing.

¨ Achievement (A) is what X accomplishes, what difference it makes.

¨ Characteristics (C) includes some of A’s characteristic are being expressed by doing X.

¨ Significance (S) includes what else is being done by doing X, what importance X has for A.

Allowable Transformations: There are various types of behavior descriptions in which some of the parameters may be omitted. A behavior description that uses at least the first five of these parameters is an intentional action description. An observer can give a behavior description in which there is more than one actor. Furthermore, an actor need not be a person. For instance, an actor could be an animal or a robot. The observer can be a team working together to give a behavior description.

Optional Action: With most intentional action, there are options to what was done, altho the actor may not consider any of them. Intentional action in which the actor does consider options is called optional action. For instance, when I answer my phone, this is an intentional act. Whether or not it is an optional act depends on whether I consider some other option. If so then what I do will be an instance of optional action, regardless of whether or not I answer the phone. Likewise when a horsefly land on my arm and I immediately swat at it this is normally an intention act. However it may occur to me that this is unlikely to kill it. So I may consider the option of waiting to swat it until it is just about to bite.

Optional action concept entails more than merely having options. The options must be considered by the actor, and they must be what William James calls live options for the actor. The direct way to check if an act was optional (rather than merely intentional) is to ask the individual to give an imagined behavior description of these options. We also judge by observing more about the action, and this is how we judge that very young children engage in optional action. This seems reasonable because their behavior seems to be a prelude to them becoming mature persons. We also use this as a basis to judge that some animals may engage in optional actions, even this is not a ubiquitous feature of their lives.

Optional action is a ubiquitous feature of our experience as persons. By this I only mean that when we reflect on what we are doing, we usually imagine alternatives, even if the only one imagined is not to do what we are doing. It is easy to realize that a large amount of what we do doesn’t directly involve optional action. I put on my walking shoes, walk east on my road until I come to a side trail, turn on this trail and avoid stepping in a large puddle a short distance down this trail, etc. I do most of my walk without imaging doing otherwise. What I find hard to believe is that I might do all of this and not even be able to imagine alternatives and to consider what it might be like to select from them. Furthermore, all of these actions occur as components in the larger behavior episode of taking a walk for exercise. This larger episode is a case of optional action, and it is one that I initiated by considering options and which I may often punctuate with choices between options.

A Paradigm Case Formulation for the Person Concept: This formulation specifies features of a paradigm case of an individual P who is a person. Allowable transformations are added to cover additional paradigm cases. This is augmented by adding expansive transformations for individuals who are not persons but who at least sometimes engage in person-like behavior. Clause (A) is called the main feature for the person concept. The others clauses are called community features of the person concept.

(A) P has a history in which optional action is ubiquitous, in the sense that it occurs frequently when P is in a normal state and guides a great deal of P’s intentional action. Moreover this history occurs as part of a dramaturgical pattern in P’s life. P has also mastered the concept of a person well enough that P can normally distinguish between persons and non-persons.

(B) P acquired the person concept by learning to act as a person in interaction with other persons.

(C) P knows how to act as a person in interaction with other persons.

(D) P uses the person concept primarily to guide P’s behavior with respect to other persons and to consider the behavior of persons with respect to other persons.

(E) P frequently engages in optional action by participating in a social practice of some community.

Allowable Transformations:

(1) Change (A) to ‘is likely to develop such a history and is likely to learn to make such a distinction, given most courses of events that P could reasonably be expected to encounter during P’s existence. The term budding person would seem to correspond to ordinary usage when we want to differentiate such a person from the paradigm case, which applies to persons after they have developed such a history. Note the budding person concept is a person but is not another paradigm case of a person.

(2) Change any or all of the other features in a manner similar to transformation (1). For instance, ‘knows how’ in (C) can be changed to ‘is likely to learn how’. As with transformation (1) this transformation produces the concept of a budding person, but does not produce a paradigm case of a person.

(3) Weaken or eliminate any or all of the community features. There need not even be any expectations about the likelihood of these features being realized, altho such a person would necessarily have the capacities for the abilities that they entail. For instance, a robot created and programmed with feature (A) and sent on a permanent solitary mission might be such a person. However, altho there is no expectation that this robot would have feature (C), it would be likely to acquire this feature if it was retrieved and placed in a setting involving other persons. In this paper, ‘personoid’ is used to distinguish those persons who do not satisfy the community features from those who do.

(4) Modify these conditions in any manner that allows a creator of the universe to be a person who exists outside of the universe and who knowingly engages in optional action. This allows the person concept to be applied to the God concept in the way that it is ordinarily used by theists, altho the account of one God in three persons complicates this. An atheist could use this concept in a shared net when disputing the claim that God exists.

Note: The term person may also be applied to fictional characters that would be classified as persons if they were real. Thus in calling of Hercules a person, we are not committed to his existential status.

Expansive Transformations: An expansive transformation indicates cases that are not included in the person concept, but that are included in some related person-like concept.

(5) Retain having a history in which optional action is ubiquitous, but weaken (A) by omitting the dramaturgical pattern, Also and leave as optional that P has mastered the concept of a person well enough that P can normally distinguish between persons and non-persons. In this paper, ‘semi‑person’ is used for such an individual.

(6) Weaken (A) by changing ‘a noteworthy history’ to ‘occasional instances’. Omit the dramaturgical pattern. Omit the ability to distinguish between persons and non-persons. In this paper, ‘quasi-person’ is used for such an individual.

Community Features: As conceptualized, the paradigm case of a person is an individual who became a person as part of one or more communities. This suggests the paraceptual question of whether this is necessary in becoming a person. What we know about feral and isolated children (feralchildren.com) suggests that this is the case with humans. I find it highly plausible that in becoming a mature person, a human starts as a budding person only because it is born into a community of persons. To acquire language, which is indispensable for seeing ones life in a dramaturgical manner, a human child needs to interact with persons. Whether a human child would even engage in optional action without some community process is a question about which I can only speculate. The ability to engage in optional action on some occasions might be due to biological rather than cultural evolution. Of course, there are claimed exceptions, as in the story of Adam and Eve who were directly created as persons. Even taken as a myth, it suggests that our ordinary concept referred to by the word ‘person’ makes no community demands, and so the allowable transformations are compatible with this ordinary concept.

Dramaturgical Patterns and Subjective Consciousness: The dramaturgical pattern feature is central to the PNDP person concept. Altho Chapter 10 of Ossorio (2006a) gave me a perspective on what this means, I have not seen a helpful concise explanation of the dramaturgical pattern concept. Instead of formulating one, I will relate the concept of acting in a dramaturgical pattern to Julian Jaynes’ concept of consciousness. Hopefully this is faithful to the concept of a dramaturgical pattern, altho the accounts I have read of the PNDP concept are not focused enough for me to be sure.

Jaynes formulates a concept of consciousness that is intertwined with what he says is wrong with prior accounts of consciousness. He indicates how concepts associated with the word consciousness are either vague or are unsuitable for thinking about significant features of our experience. This may obscure the fact that his concept is entirely independent of any theory about how the brain works or his theory about the origins of consciousness. The term ‘subjective consciousness’ will be used for the Jaynes concept of consciousness. Subjective consciousness is a concept and is thus neither true nor false. Instead, it is more or less useful for some purposes. I find it of great personal utility. In fact, I could use it to formulate the concept of a person. Instead of the formulation given above; I could have given the central feature of the paradigm case more concisely by saying that a person is an individual whose behavioral history is shaped to a noteworthy extent by subjective consciousness. All of the persons I know are subjectively conscious, and I think the paradigm case of a PNDP person could be taken as a subjectively conscious individual. Transformation (4) gave an example of a person who might not be, since being omniscient might make all the features to be described below irrelevant.

Jaynes gives six features for the concept of subjective consciousness: {spatialization, excerption, analog-I, metaphor-me, narratization, conciliation}. These are ubiquitous in the experience of a subjectively conscious individual. In fact, I find it hard to imagine what it would be like not to depend on them. This is the main reason I initially found Jaynes’ theory interesting but barely plausible. I will only briefly sketch these features. For more detail, see Origins of Consciousness (pp. 59-65) by Julian Jaynes.

Spatialization refers to the use of a metaphorical mind-space in which an individual separates the things it considers as if they were individual objects. Spatialization applies not only to things that have spatial qualities in the physical world. It applies to whatever an individual thinks about. It uses the metaphor of seeing for abstract entities, which it separates so that it can see how they are related. It spatializes time, viewing years as laid out in succession, usually from left to right.

Since a finite individual can only pay attention to part of an aspect of its world at any moment, it never sees anything in its entirety. Nor for dramatic purposes would it want to. Instead, it excerpts what it considers important and worth bringing into focus. Excerption involves thinking of an aspect in terms of some of its very limited features. Thinking of my garden, I see leaves covering part of it, weeds among the onions and garlic, some pepper plants. At another time, I might see other features. Of course, this seeing is in my mind-space, for I am not currently looking at my garden.

The central feature of subjective consciousness is the metaphor of an analog-I as an actor. This what an individual uses in order to imagine something it might do. The analog-I moves about in its mind-space, doing things it is not actually doing. It also forms excerptions of things it has done. Without this analog-I, it might have live options, but it could not select among them by considering what it might imagine as alternative outcomes. Deliberating about what to do in terms of future consequences would not be possible. Shall I weed the garlic early this afternoon? It will be in the sun at that time, but if I only do one patch, I can go cool off in the creek before I get too uncomfortable. On the other hand, I can go to the creek first and get gravel to repair the road.

The analog-I looks out at some state of affairs and imagines acting within or upon it. An individual can also step back, observe itself as acting and think about what would be happening to itself. The metaphor-me is this affected version of itself that it observes in its mind-space. My analog-I is imagined as weeding the garlic and going to the creek. It is my metaphor-me that gets too hot and that becomes cool in the creek.

Our analog-I sees itself as the main figure in a story that takes place in our spatialized time. Narratization is the process of telling itself this story about what it is doing or might be going to do, and about how the facts it notices or imagines fit in with this. Narratization explains why it did what it did or why it might select alternatives. It provides a rationale for how it might act in novel situations as they arise.

Conciliation is the process of bringing perceptions together as conscious recognizable objects. It does so in a way that makes excerpts from these stimuli compatible with each other and its ongoing narratization. Conciliation does in the mind-space what narratization does in mind-time.

Subjective Consciousness and Optional Action: I will make a conjecture relating subjective consciousness to optional action.

Perhaps an individual must be subjectively conscious in order to have a dramaturgical pattern of optional action as a ubiquitous feature of its experience and to utilize this dramaturgical pattern to support the options selected.

I look at the log and where to aim my ax swing. I place a wedge where my ax struck. I pick up the sledgehammer. Etc. I consider all of these options in the broader context of preparing my supply of firewood and how this fits into my life.

Private Languages and Dramaturgical Patterns: Altho humans initially acquire language by interacting with other humans, they can use language to think about the world and about what they are doing in it. To see ones life in a dramaturgical pattern, it is only this use of language that is needed, at least for thinking about any episodes that do not involve communicating with others. By a private language, I mean a tool that is used for thinking about the world but that has not been acquired by interaction with others and has never been used to communicate. In fact, this is exactly what would be needed for the existence of a personoid. Whether a private language or a personoid could exist is a paraceptual matter, and hence cannot be settled by conceptual analysis. Traditional monotheists talk as if they are committed to the existence of at least one private language (In the beginning was the word). If the word ‘language’ is restricted to a concept that involves communication in an essential manner, then the term ‘private language’ refers to a conceptual tool that is not a type of language but a type of partial language.

Syntactic Language and Narrative Usage: In this paper the term syntactic language is reserved for languages whose syntactic structure is flexible enough to be used for a variety of purposes, that include proposing and requesting elaborate information, giving detailed commands, expressing subtle feelings. Even more significant its semantics involves an extensive reliance on metaphor (see Jaynes Chapter 2). A syntactic language will also have the capacity to be used for telling stories, and when used for telling simple stories about what happened we will say it is used for rudimentary narrative purposes. Mature narrative usage is conceptualized as telling stories about oneself and others that are recognized as fictional and that may involve both the past and the future. Narratization involves being able to tell stories with oneself as actor in mind-space and mind-time. Altho not explicitly mentioned by Jaynes, I think that doing so involves mature narrative usage of language and that he believes that rudimentary narrative usage is necessary but not sufficient for narratization.

Comment: An individual might be able to recognize options but not implicitly understand this as a central aspect of itself. Moreover, it might not see itself as involved in a dramaturgical pattern. Such an individual could engage in optional action without being able to make a distinction between individuals who could and those who could not do so. This latter ability would seem to be more sophisticated than the mere ability to know options or even to have a history in which optional action is ubiquitous. Using feature (A), the ability to make a distinction between individuals who could recognize options and those who cannot is central to what it means to be a person. It is for this reason I classify a personoid as a type of person but do not classify semi‑persons or any other types of quasi-persons as persons. This does not mean that a person must be able to articulate this distinction between actions that involve options and actions that do not. A person must merely be able to react to it appropriately, altho not always correctly. For instance, altho I may seem to chastise my computer, this is merely a way of venting, and I know that my computer is not reflecting on whether to respond to my concerns. Likewise, a child’s belief that the Easter Bunny is a person probably indicates a mistaken paraceptual belief rather than a misunderstanding about this distinction or any other conceptual misunderstanding.

Terminology: A phrase like ‘the person concept’ might suggest that there is a unique concept indicated by the term ‘person’, whereas it only indicates a concept that is currently being designated by that term. In general such language is used with the caveat that it should be interpreted in a way that makes concepts more basic than locutions for them. An earlier version of this paper limited the term ‘person’ to the paradigm case, using ‘personoid’ for the broader case, rather than limiting this term to those who became persons without the assistance of a community. I did this because PNDP terminology seemed to demand community features that might be incompatible with the allowable transformations that I formulated. Whatever PNDP may allow as special cases of persons, it is clear there that PNDP usage of the term applies mostly to persons who became persons by interacting with other persons. Because there are some different person concepts, I decided not to restrict the term person to the PNDP person concept. Instead, I tried to formulate a version of a person concept that would also include as persons those individuals that would be included by any other widely used person concept.

Budding Persons: I included as persons those who might be expected to acquire a dramaturgical history of optional action. An earlier version referred to them as ‘potential persons’. However this term has the connotation of not being a person, and given the attitudes of many people, I decided to use the term ‘budding person’ instead. The term ‘maturing person’ indicates those who are in the process of acquiring a noteworthy history of optional action in a dramaturgical pattern. A fertilized egg that is to be discarded is not likely to acquire a history of optional action in this life, but many believe that it will in another life. Whether this is so, is a paraceptual matter about which there is considerable disagreement. However, in a public net, concepts should not depend on paraceptual consensus. Terminology in a public net should bring paraceptual concerns into focus rather than obscuring them. In general, a number of paraceptual concerns could be more easily understood if concepts are clearly formulated. Appendix 2 indicates some of the paraceptual concerns about persons that I find of interest and how I would bring them into focus.

In saying that there are different person concepts, this only means that the term ‘person’ is used for more than one concept, somewhat like the term ‘bat’ is used for more than one concept. However, in using ‘bat’ for both an inanimate object and a flying animal, context indicates which is being used. On the other hand, when people use the term person, it may not be apparent when they are using different concepts. In fact, this may often be the case in disputes about abortion. Moreover, someone may even unknowingly use the term person for different concepts, an unlikely event when using the term bat. There may even be a dispute about what a person really is; as if a paraceptual matter was at issue. In fact, a heated dispute over the use of the locution ‘person’ is likely to be a paraceptual dispute about cosmic versions. I want terminology that does not confound conceptual and paraceptual concerns. Moreover as indicated earlier, I also want terminology that takes account of the sensibilities of any community who might use it.

Humans: The person concept in this paper only has a functional component. The concept of human also has the biological component of being a member of the Homo sapiens species. A variety of functional persons who are not human can at least be imagined. Some biological ones include androids, some extra-terrestrials, Mickey Mouse, leprechauns, etc. Non-biological one would include some very sophisticated robots. Supernatural beings, such as angels or pagan gods, would be classified as non-human persons. Altho cosmic beliefs and related attitudes might make some people hesitate in referring to some of these as persons, referring to an individual as a functional person does not mean that it must have the same status as a human. Nor does having a concept for a type of non-human persons entail any paraceptual existential claims. Thinking of some of these as fictitious persons seems to be acceptable to most people. For those who would deny the possibility of some type of non-human persons, the concept of a certain type of non-human person could be useful for understanding those would assert the possibility. The utility of extending a functional person concept to non-humans is further developed in Appendix 2.

Altho I did not limit the term ‘person’ to the social practice PNDP person concept, I did take this concept as the paradigm case in my formulation. This seemed appropriate because it is this concept that we mostly act on and which permeates our interactions with humans. However, I did not want to limit the term ‘person’ to those that meet the community parts of the formulation. The reason is the same as not limiting the concept to humans. First a monotheistic creator of the universe would not satisfy these conditions. Moreover suppose we someday encounter an extra-terrestrials or create a robot that satisfied the central feature but not the community feature of the person concept. In interacting with such an individual it might be useful to regard it more as a type of person than as a non-person.

A Biological Person Concept: Any purely biological person concept is likely to exclude supernatural beings, making it unsuitable for an inclusive public net. Moreover, the Homo sapiens concept would seem already to provide all that a non-functional biological concept would include.

Recognizing Persons: There is one major advantage in taking a version of a functional person concept as the one to be use in our routine public net. We interact with persons. In doing so, we usually implicitly regard others as persons by what they do. So a functional person concept can be easily understood by any person. It is also indicative of how we would think about what to expect in interacting with non-humans who engaged in optional action in a dramaturgical pattern.

Knowing: The optional action concept depends on what it means to know. I often say that our dog Boston knows the backyard gate is open and that he knows he can get out when it is open. He also knows the signal that allows him to do so. Since he cannot formulate any of this by using propositions, we could use some other term such as ‘recognizes’, leaving ‘knows’ only for propositional knowledge. However common usage allows ‘know’ to be used more broadly, and many people find this useful. For one thing, it allows us to focus on a way that some non-human behavior is like ours. This seems to be especially useful in thinking about behavior potential that involves learning. Boston did not always know that he needed permission to go out that gate. This was something that he learned.

Just as I conceptualized having a concept in terms of acting on it, I conceptualize knowing in terms of behavior potential. An individual knows X if it can successfully integrate X into its actions. For someone giving a behavior description, this means that this is a value of the know-parameter that could be appropriately given by a describer. Behavior potential includes, but goes beyond, the potential to act linguistically. Language plays an important role by bringing knowledge into focus, especially by allowing us to reflect on and communicate about what we know. With a broader concept of knowing, knowledge may or may not involve the ability to use language.

Altho Boston’s behavior indicates that he has the concept of an open gate and knows when it is open. I do not know if Boston knows options when he sees an open gate. He appears to be considering whether to go out or to stay in, altho this may merely be my anthropomorphic reaction. I find it moderately plausible that he knows these options, and if he does then he does sometimes engage in optional action. In saying this I am using the concept of a personal plausibility attitude towards a proposition, i.e. I am indicating the extent to which I am willing to take it into account when considering it, but not whether doing so is warranted. Thus I am not suggesting that I have any evidence that Boston is a quasi-person.

Charmayne once said that Caleb heard the vacuum cleaner in the other room and knew that it was Jennifer. Caleb was nine months old and clearly could not articulate this. It was by his reaction that Charmayne knew that Caleb knew, and she did not hesitate to say that he knew. We also tend to use ‘know’ for nonverbal information of adults. When P claims to know the way home, we do not normally expect P to formulate what P knows linguistically. In fact, most information about the way home is likely to be more pictorial than verbal. Not only does such pictorial knowledge go beyond propositional knowledge, much of our other informational knowledge also does. What a person knows about some realm of interest can be termed realm knowledge. Even for a minor realm, a person’s realm knowledge may go far beyond propositional knowledge. Ask a basketball player to tell you everything he knows about the limited realm of last night’s game. Much of what he knows will be left unsaid.

Example: Walking home and thinking about language and informational knowledge, I asked myself what knowledge I had about what I had just encountered but was now behind me. I imagined various things and turned around to check. One very specific state of affairs that I recalled was there being more than 5 rental trucks on my left. Altho I formulated this linguistically, the essence of what I knew was not verbal. I examined an image in order to verbalize it. Even the numerical content was recalled before I verbalized it. I turned to count and saw 9 trucks, something I did not already know. Furthermore, altho my current account sounds like propositional knowledge, this is merely a way to bring it into focus.

My recall often involves sensory memory, especially for much of my informational knowledge with visual components. This includes knowledge about aspects of the world that are not necessarily spatial. When I think about knowing the proof of LaGrange’s Theorem the main thing I recall is a picture, and I also recall a picture when I think about knowing a proof of the Quadratic Reciprocity Theorem. We also imagine temporal relationships visually. We lay our life out as if it was a line, and thinking that I did X before Y often involves (metaphorically) seeing myself at an earlier point on that line. I know that I lived in Marissa before I lived in Glenville. I may formulate this as a proposition, but it is a part of my basic reliable knowledge that I recall by seeing a variety of events in my life history. The event of falling from the pecan tree in Glenville is something I recall as an image and a sensation.

Person-Like Behavior: Altho our dog knows that he can get out and that he can stay in when the gate is open, I cannot tell if he knows of this as an option. Even if he does, I would not classify him as a person or even as a semi-person. At most, optional action seems to be a small part of what he does. It may be that what seems to be optional action in animals is merely intentional with conflicting intent, i.e. perhaps they are drawn towards alternatives without being aware of having options. Where this seems least plausible to me is in certain problem solving situations. One such is the account of the chimpanzee Sultan solving the problem of getting the banana by combining two sticks. Another is the account of problem solutions in the study of the raven behavior in the April 2007 Scientific American. It is how the solution seemed to occur, rather than the form it took, that gives the appearance of optional action.

The term quasi-person may suggest that occasionally engaging in optional action makes an individual more like a person than might be warranted. On the other hand, it does suggest a way in which some animals may be more like persons than are other non-persons and that some person-like characteristics are fairly widespread. This term is used, not so much as an attribute for classification, but as a way of indicating a current operational perspective. Thus referring to a raven as a quasi-person would be done only when this might be a useful way of thinking about it for the purposes at hand. However even if optional action is more than an occasional occurrence for some animals, we do not have any currently existing clear-cut examples of semi-persons. Nor do we do we have clear evidence that they existed in the past, altho perhaps they were precursors to the emergence of persons.

There are two main reasons that I am interested in having concepts for person-like behavior in individuals who are not functional persons. Both relate to the fact that humans are the only widely acknowledged examples of functional persons. My interest in the semi-person concept relates the question of the origin of functional persons. Did semi-persons exist only in the past as precursors to persons or did the emergence of persons occur without any such precursors? My interest in the quasi-person concept relates to the question of the possible existence of persons who are unlike humans in the sense that they are personoids. If some asocio-animals are quasi-persons, could evolution have given rise to personoids?

Quasi-Persons: If domestic dogs have learned to be quasi-persons then perhaps it is because of their association with humans. If wild dogs are quasi-persons, perhaps this is because optional action is necessary for the social way they hunt. Candidates for semi-persons in the animal world include dolphins and some of the great apes, altho they are not clear-cut examples. However in each of these cases any abilities to engage in optional actions may only emerge via community. After all, the ability to engage in optional action could be an advantage to dealing with the complexities of being in a social group.

The concept of an asocio-quasi-person might be useful for someone interested in whether personoids could exist. If there are asocial species that engage in optional action, perhaps such a species could at least evolve into a species of asocio-semi-persons. Beyond that they would need to develop syntactic language to become personoids. That this could happen seems at least barely plausible to me. To consider this, it might be useful to think about how community relates to their acquisition of the ability to engage in optional action. Drawing paraceptual conclusions would demand research I do not have the ability or inclination to conduct. The utility of such research may be somewhat remote, but it might provide some additional perspectives on optional action and intentional action in the realm of biology. What I said about quasi-persons is merely suggestive of how to use concepts to think about some ordinary matters that might be of interest to people who are fascinated by animals. However we need not restrict ourselves to thinking about animals. Is being biological even necessary for being either alive or being an asocio-quasi-person? Perhaps a robot could be made that was one.

The ability to know options would also seem to have some utility for any animal capable of learning, and there is no conceptual reason to consider optional action as impossible for asocial animals. In fact, the behavior of some solitary predators might at least appear to involve some optional actions. Perhaps all solitary animals with the capacity to learn also have the capacity to develop the ability to know options and thus to be asocio-quasi-persons. If so, could a private language emerge in an asocial animal species thru biological evolution via a process of natural selection? Could a genetic code be such that a private language would emerge with maturation, or even immediately after birth? This is clearly not the case with humans who must learn language via community.

Semi-Persons: I must admit that I have a liking for the term ‘semi-person’ and using it for classification purposes. This is largely due to my fascination with the work of Julian Jaynes. I also wonder about whether Adam and Eve might not be classified as semi-person before eating the forbidden fruit. This is obviously would not be endorsed by people who takes the story literally and believe that God created them as persons. For someone who treats this story as either a myth or a parable a different perspective might be taken, since without the knowledge of good and evil it would seem difficult to be subjectively conscious. They did not even know that they were naked. Jaynes might consider the story of the Garden of Eden to be about a longed for bicameral past when choice was not so problematic.

Altho a semi-person has a noteworthy history of optional action, what disqualifies a semi-person from being a person is its inability to see this history as a dramaturgical pattern. The concept of acting in a dramaturgical pattern does not merely involve someone else seeing an individual’s history that way. It is conceptualized as something understood by the actor and whose aspect the actor could articulate. The dramaturgical pattern is a major aspect of the person concept. Without a language that could be used for mature narratization, having a history of action that is seen to be in a dramaturgical pattern would not be conceptually possible. Thus the emergence of functional persons was either preceded by or concurrent with the emergence of syntactic language. Nor is the mere existence of syntactic language sufficient. The ability to conceptualize oneself as an actor in an ongoing drama is also needed. This entails being able to take both the observer and critic roles as conceptualized in PNDP. All of this is what is involved in mature narrative usage of language and in being subjectively conscious.

In addition to the dramaturgical pattern feature, being a person involves knowing the distinction between persons and non-persons. As indicated earlier, this involves more than having a noteworthy history of optional action. It might even seem to involve more than seeing ones life in a dramaturgical pattern. However I interpret being subjectively conscious as being able to act effectively on this distinction within an individual’s mind-space, for otherwise the ability to narrate as a critic and observer would be too severely limited. Thus I am taking the ability to make the distinction between persons and non-persons as part of a way to indicate what it means to act in a dramaturgical pattern, rather than as something beyond this feature.

Since I find reincarnation at most barely plausible, I find it highly plausible that new persons emerge. Of course, becoming a person in a world of persons does not seem problematic, or at least not as much as the emergence of a person in a world devoid of persons. This was what primarily motivated me to formulate the concept of a semi-person. To consider the origins of persons, we might conjecture that the emergence of persons was preceded by the emergence of individuals who had some of the features of persons, altho special creation seems to be the explanation that many people find satisfactory. Of course, having concepts does not provide the paraceptual information that would be needed to settle any questions about the origins of persons. However, it might suggest some conjectures to investigate and ways to formulate them. It can also be useful in bringing paraceptual differences into focus, such as those between creationists and evolutionists.

Appendix 1 expands upon the question of the emergence of functional persons. It is intended to be neutral with respect to any paraceptual claims, altho it was influenced by the work of Julian Jaynes. Altho his theory is unlikely to seem plausible to a creationist, he does raise some of the problems that origin of persons might raise for someone who wants give an evolutionary account of how this happened. Appendix 1 may be too brief to bring this into focus. My paper CPCS Comprehensive Paradigm Shifts also may be relevant, altho it does not use the semi-person concept.

Main Points: The focus on this paper is on paradigm case formulation of a functional person concept, along with some expansive transformations to give some concepts for thinking about some types of person-like individuals. The main points of the paper are given below.

¨ The feature shared by all functional persons is to be an individual having or likely to have a history in which optional action in a dramaturgical pattern is ubiquitous. A functional person has also sufficiently mastered the concept of a person to distinguish between persons and non-persons.

¨ The concept of a dramaturgical pattern can be briefly characterized in terms of the concept of subjective consciousness formulated by Julian Jaynes.

¨ The concept of optional action provides a way of thinking about actions having the features of deliberate action regardless of whether or not they involve engaging in social practices.

¨ Some community features are give given for the paradigm case along with transformations to allow for a more inclusive functional person concept that includes personoids.

¨ A functional person concept is suitable for an inclusive routine public net for thinking about what persons do. Neither a primarily religious nor a purely biological person concept is suitable for such a net, if the term ‘person’ is to be used in a way that takes account of different sensibilities.

¨ The concept of a quasi-person is a tool for thinking about occasional deliberate or optional action in the realm of animal behavior.

¨ The concept of a semi-person is a tool for thinking about the origins of individuals who would satisfy the central feature of the functional person concept. In particular, this concept can be used to think about the work of Julian Jaynes.

APPENDIX 1 THE ORIGIN OF FUNCTIONAL PERSONS

Anyone believing in special creation might merely say that all that is involved in the emergence of persons occurred in the act of the creator. Anyone believing that we might some day design artificial persons should find special creation at least barely plausible. For a creationist, the concept of a semi-person might have minimal utility, perhaps only for saying that God did not create any semi-persons and to challenge anyone to show that there ever were any semi-persons. Anyone who finds a gradual emergence of persons plausible should be able to see that the semi-person concept could be used for thinking about how person-like individuals may have preceded persons. My knowledge of established empirical results relating to all of this is perfunctory. In spite of this, I will formulate a number of offhand remarks to indicate the type of paraceptual information I would like to have. Some of these were motivated by Jaynes’ theory about the origins of consciousness.

Perhaps any individuals that could engage in optional action could also be able to live a life with a noteworthy history of optional action that it sees as part of a dramaturgical pattern. However I find it more plausible that that at some point individuals having the ability to engage in optional action would have emerged merely as semi-persons.

If the emergence of persons was gradual and was preceded by the emergence of semi‑persons then the first of these on our planet may have been members of some hominid species. This raises the question of how much optional action is likely to occur without syntactic language. For instance, can one have a noteworthy history of optional action without being able to articulate the options involved as intentional act rather than merely as performances? Clearly, we proceed thru episodes without much thought about the multitude of choices we might have selected, but it is hard for us to imagine that we could not describe an alternative to anything we did. Altho you may have taken many steps without considering pausing in order to rest, you can look back and imagine resting after any one of these steps. Without syntactic language such a recollection hardly seems possible. However, it is the ability to reflect on options that demands mature narrative language, rather than the actions themselves. It seems at least somewhat plausible that if some optional actions occur without using language, then perhaps a history of optional action could also occur without using language. Of course using language would seem to be a major help in developing such a history, as well as conceptually necessary for it being in a dramaturgical pattern. This is why it might be correct to classify most hominids as semi-persons rather than as persons.

Jaynes explicitly claims that subjective consciousness comes after mature narrative language. This is not a paraceptual claim. Using the concept of subjective consciousness, it is merely an important conceptual observation. It raises the question of whether there even may have been cultures of Homo sapiens whose members would not be classified as persons. For whether or not having a history of optional action in a dramaturgical pattern is equivalent to being subjectively conscious, they are closely related and both depend on a mature narrative usage of language. Of course, this conceptual observation cannot settle any paraceptual claims. I find it useful because it helps bring paraceptual claims and questions into focus. Specifically, did the emergence of a syntactic language occur over millenniums or did it evolve quickly or was it given by a special act of creation? Furthermore, the mere existence of syntactic language is not conceptually sufficient for subjective consciousness. Mature narrative usage is also necessary if an individual is to have the ability to conceptualize itself as an actor in an ongoing drama. This entails being able to take both the roles of observer and critic. Did the development of syntactic language depend on its being used for basic narrative purposes? Did it develop without being used for mature narrative purposes? It is clear how Jaynes would answer this last question, and that he would claim that early Homo sapiens were not persons in the PNDP sense of this term.

Not only would Jaynes claim that early Homo sapiens were semi-persons rather than persons, he makes what I found on my first reading an extravagant claim that mature bicameral civilizations existed for centuries prior to the emergence of subjective consciousness. Whatever plausibility attitude you take towards Jaynes’ theory about the origin of consciousness, if you are interested in the origin of persons, I recommend reading his book with the attitude that his theory is at least barely plausible. Anyone who finds this of interest might also be interested in the website (www.julianjaynes.org) of the Julian Jaynes Society. As far as I know, his theory of the origin of subjective consciousness is the only one that has been worked out in a high level of detail. Understanding his position could be useful in formulating a detailed alternative, and especially in formulating one in which evolution produced Homo sapiens as a subjectively conscious species. I am not going to discuss what Jaynes has said. My attempts to explain his work have always left me dissatisfied. His theory does not lend itself to a brief presentation, and even after reading his book several times my perspective seems inadequate. Instead, I will indicate some of the questions his book has raised for me.

According to Jaynes, the immediate predecessors to subjectively conscious individuals were bicameral ones. What they were like is introduced in the chapter entitled Mind of the Iliad. I take this (and further descriptions) as a conceptualization. Altho Jaynes claims that the men in the Iliad were bicameral, his conceptualization does not depend on his paraceptual claims. Whether or not there were complex bicameral civilizations, as Jaynes tries to demonstrate, the concept of a bicameral man qualifies at least as a semi-person. Perhaps bicameral men might even qualify as the most sophisticated semi-persons that have been seriously conceptualized. On the other hand, they might be budding persons who are likely to acquire a history of optional action in a dramaturgical pattern in some afterlife. Altho a bicameral man is not subjectively conscious, he can engage in complex social practices that may involve optional action. He fails to be subjectively conscious because he does not do so in a dramaturgical manner. His recognition of options and the extent to which optional action is a ubiquitous part of his history has a different basis. Since he uses a wide variety of established choice principles that allow for optional action in most ordinary manners, optional action is seldom a problem that calls for a mature narrative use of language. This is also the case with much of what persons do, since we also usually select options without narrating a fictional account of an analog-I making choices and imagining consequences in our mind-space. Narratization is mostly used in situations that are more problematic. This is not available to bicameral man. Instead, his choice is made by following the dictate of a voice that, with the stored-up admonitory wisdom of his life, tells him non-consciously what to do (Jaynes p85).

Even when I found Jaynes’ theory only slightly plausible, it suggested interesting possibilities and questions. Was the emergence of subjective consciousness as recent as about 3000 years ago? Did it not emerge in the Americas until about 500 years ago? Was it due to cultural factors rather than genetic or biological ones? Did it result in changes in the organization of the brain rather than follow from such changes? Prior to that, were there millenniums in which there were Homo sapiens who were only semi-persons? Were there bicameral pre-civilizations? If so what kind of semi-person were the even earlier Homo sapiens? Jaynes has only one small suggestion about this. Unlike the manifest polytheistic paradigms of the civilizations that Jaynes believes were bicameral, there were cultures having animistic paradigms. Does having such a cosmic version indicate an inability to make a significant distinction between optional actions and those that were merely intentional? All of these questions suggest that while certain biological characteristics may be necessary for being biological persons, they are not sufficient. What is missing is a way of thinking. Whether or not Jaynes is correct about any part of his theory, he made me focus on a special aspect of his subjective consciousness concept and the PNDP person concept. Being subjectively conscious (or equivalently being a person) is conceptualized in a way that involves conceptual abilities and the acquisition of a very special type of conceptual net. As indicated by Ossorio, to be a person is to have sufficiently mastered the person concept. To paraphrase Descartes, “I choose therefore I am what I am”. Perhaps this is something that only a person can truthfully say.

APPENDIX 2 BRINGING SOME PARACEPTUAL CONCERNS INTO FOCUS

Terminology: In this appendix, the term ‘person’ is used for the concept of a functional person, including budding functional persons. The term ‘eternal individual’ is used for concept of an individual (person or otherwise) whose existence is not bound to terminate. The adjective ‘eternal’ is used in the potential rather than the actual sense, i.e. an eternal person need not be indestructible but is also not limited in such a way that its existence must terminate. Most traditional monotheists believe that God is an eternal person who is indestructible.

Ontological Claims about Eternal Persons: Differences in existential commitment and related ontological disagreement are pronounced and strongly held. The propositions or conjectures that could be imagined and the attitudes towards their verification vary extensively. Altho this can be understood without the concept of an eternal person, I find it useful to use the eternal person concept to bring these matters concisely into focus. Moreover using a concept involves no ontological commitments. Since strong paraceptual beliefs are involved, using the concept of an eternal person may be of minimal use in resolving the disagreement. In general, most people consider beliefs on such matters that differ from their own as false. Moreover these beliefs (altho paraceptual) are non-empirical in the sense that there is no agreed upon systematic methods for investigating them.

The first seven propositions below have been held by a noteworthy number of people, with the parenthetical addendum indicating one of the communities that I think had or has a belief like the one indicated. Some others are also given, including some that most people have not considered and would find even more fantastic than the commonly held beliefs. However, they at least suggest that much more can be imagined than the beliefs commonly held. Even more could have been imagined.

Prop 1: There are no eternal persons. (Physicalist)

Prop 2: All humans are eternal persons. (Christian)

Prop 3: God is the only eternal person. (Sadducees)

Prop 4: In addition to eternal persons, there are eternal quasi-persons and other eternal individuals who are not yet persons. (Hindu)

Prop 5: Humans are eternal persons, but a person’s soul is destroyed if his body is not preserved. (Ancient Egyptian)

Prop 6: Only those who accept Jesus as their personal redeemer are eternal persons. Those who do not accept him merely perish at death, i.e. go out of existence. (Merciful Christian)

Prop 7: The only humans that are eternal persons are male. (Extreme Male Chauvinist)

Prop 8 Humans do not become eternal persons until they are accepted into the community.(Ancient Eskimo)

Prop 9: A cloned human cannot be an eternal person.

Prop 10: It may be possible to create a robot that is an eternal person.

Prop 11 A human is an eternal person if and only if its parents are married in the sight of God.

Prop 12 Humans do not become eternal persons until they are born.

Prop 13 Humans do not become eternal persons until they become subjectively conscious.

Prop 14 Becoming an eternal person is a matter of competence, which some humans obtain but others do not.

Social Practices and Choice Principles: In addition to ontological beliefs, there are consensus considerations that need to be examined about desirable social practices and choice principles. Resolution of such matters may or may not depend on any propositions about eternal persons.

Humans and Status Issues: The PNDP concept of status is conceptualized broadly. Status involves having a place that carries with it some eligibility considerations. The status of being a child’s parent normally makes the parent eligible to determine that child’s bedtime. To have a status is to be assigned that status and to thus have associated eligibilities. To understand any status concept, we must identify how it is assigned. A status such as best friend can be assigned informally by a single person without any explicit criteria. It can be revoked in a similar manner. A status such as registered voter is assigned with a specific action by a political community and is based on explicit criteria. The status of baseball player is assigned informally on the basis of consensus about what the status entails among those for whom that status has sufficient relevance. The status movie star is assigned by informal consensus without any specific criteria being articulated or even implicitly agreed upon. This can be clear enough for most purposes, but there will be borderline cases.

A person’s characteristics and actions relate to having a various statuses, but more is often involved. In particular, status is often assigned either explicitly or implicitly. For instance, being your friend may be influenced by a person’s characteristics and actions, but being your friend is status that only you can assign. Moreover you can continue calling a person your friends if his actions and characteristics change, altho there are some changes that might make you reassess this status assignment.

Many statuses are community statuses in the sense that they indicate a place in a community and eligibility in regard to the institutions and social practices of that community. Eligibility may include more than having options for engaging in various forms of action. For instance, having the status of a person’s spouse may protect you from being forced to testify against your spouse. A community may be small, such as a nuclear family. Having some of its most noteworthy statuses, such as parent and child, are largely determined by biological factors, but as in the social practice of adoption, these statuses can be assigned. Moreover the eligibilities that accompany them vary considerably and are influenced both by the family and the broader communities to which the family belongs. In addition there may be a number of other statuses that have various eligibilities. For instance, a child who is considered as highly responsible may have a number of options that another child might not have.

Some people regard themselves and all other humans as members of a broad community, which they call the human community. This not universal, altho there is a growing trend to think this way. Clearly, even in the contemporary world, some people have not thought of themselves in this manner. For the purposes of this discussion I will use a community concept that allows humanity to be classified as a community. For the PNDP community concept, see Putnam (1981). The most basic status in a community is that of being a member. The concern over when human life begins and ends indicates that there is some lack of consensus on membership in the human community. Altho this may seem to involve paraceptual considerations it can be regarded as a status issue. In fact it is hard to see what information is relevant to a question about when human life actually begins or ends.

The most fundamental eligibility that membership in the human involves is being treated as a human. Altho there is not universal agreement on what this entails, it clearly makes a difference. The fact that there is anything like a cohesive human community is fairly recent state of affairs. Moreover, even now many humans do not think in terms of such a community. Otherwise it seems unlikely that slavery and genocide would still be a major problem. Nor would there be a great need for organizations like Human Rights Watch. Being a member of the human community would entitle an individual to many of those rights in the eyes of anyone who considered themselves as members of that community.

Before turning to specific status issues about membership in the human community, we might consider the relevance of biological information. Prior to cloning possibilities, the relevant biological facts seem straightforward. We have clear-cut criteria for when an egg is fertilized, when it first divides, when a child is born, and multitude of other biological conditions. Likewise relevant criteria for facts about cloning could be formulated. Which of these we call the beginning of human life is a matter of concepts and locutions, altho these could influence status considerations. I think that the most useful criteria for the beginning of a new biological individual (except in the case of cloning) would be when the egg is fertilized or when a fertilized egg is implanted in a womb. Which I would favor depends on human consensus, and I would recommend using this locution in a way that would be sensitive to as many humans as is practical. Biological criteria relevant in the case of cloning should not be that difficult to specify. Criteria for when a biological individual ceases may be less clear-cut.

Altho more could be said about the relevance of biological information, for most people the important paraceptual considerations are about the beginning or end of a biological individual. Their use of ‘human life’ is not primarily biological. It involves beliefs about eternal persons and related value concerns. Some people are likely to think about when God infuses a soul and when the soul departs from the body for the afterlife. To put this into focus, consider a discussion between Pamela and Cathy. They are both students in Jo’s conceptual studies seminar, where Jo introduced them to the concepts in this present paper

Jo: Pamela is a physicalist holds Prop 1. Cathy is a Christian who holds Prop 2. Both take closely related versions of the golden rule as their basic ethical principle. Both also agree with the principles in the universal declaration of human rights and many other issues regarding social practices that relate to the status of humans. It is unclear to me to what extent you disagree about paraceptual matters or about values. For the sake of clarity, I want to avoid using the concept of a soul, which seems to involve some immaterial entity. Cathy feels that this concept is perfectly clear, but Pamela thinks the concept is basically incoherent. On the other hand, altho you disagree about the existence of eternal persons, will you at least try to use the same concept. Perhaps you can each state the crux of your disagreement.

Cathy: Altho I think of an eternal person as having an immortal soul, this is not relevant to when human life begins. Human life begins at a conception because that is when God creates an eternal person, regardless of what the underlying support might be.

Pamela: If human life begins with the creation of an eternal person then it could never begin, because there are no eternal persons. I think human life begins at birth because that is when the baby begins to engage in intentional action. Before then its activity is unintentional.

Cathy: This is why we are at an impasse. I agree that a baby engages is intentional action after birth, but how do we know that it does not do so before birth. Moreover this is irrelevant. If Pamela does not believe in eternal persons then she does not have any way to determine when human life begins.

Pamela: I might be wrong about activity in the womb not being intentional, but a fertilized egg cannot engage in intentional action. Perhaps human life begins earlier than birth, but it certainly does not begin at conception.

Jo: Your disagreement about eternal persons is a paraceptual matter, but I think your impasse over when human life begins is about a locution. It is apparent that you are using ‘human life’ for different concepts. However I am unclear about the concepts you are using. I think we can find a way to use this locution for the same concept, but first I want to consider some paraceptual matters. How would we know at what point God creates an eternal person or even what legal status he wants it to have? A scripture passage that I have heard quoted refers to God knowing someone in his mother’s womb. Perhaps an eternal person is created, not when an egg is fertilized, but when it is implanted in a womb.

Pamela: There are some people who believe in eternal person who have taken this position. According to them discarding an in vitro fertilized egg would not involve destroying a human life. So would use of the morning after pill.

Cathy: Altho I would prefer to say that most Christians believe that human life begins when an egg is fertilized, I will just say that they believe an eternal person begins when an egg is fertilized. This is the position of my church. I am sure that this is the correct scriptural position.

Jo: It is apparent that there are some paraceptual differences over when an eternal person comes into existence. Believers in reincarnation might even claim that it is prior to conception. Moreover, there is no widely agreed upon method for investigating such claims. Yet all are willing to say that human life exists. Since you are both still talking about human life, perhaps we could see if we could find a way to use this locution for the same concept. Conceptualizing human life in terms of eternal persons is not suitable for a shared net. Nor do I think that conceptualizing human life in terms of the ability to engage in intentional action would be suitable. I suspect that Cathy would agree that a fertilized egg couldn’t engage in intentional action. However, even if she is open to a concept of human life that does not involve the concept of an eternal person, I doubt that an intentional action concept would satisfy her.

Pamela: I hadn’t thought about the what I meant by human life, but I implicitly regarded it as entailing intentional action by a genetically human organism. Perhaps my intentional action criterion is too narrow. This not the way we commonly use the term ‘life’. Biologically, a single cell is alive, altho nobody calls a single human skin cell a human life. It is not a viable organism. Using the term ‘budding person’ for someone who had not yet acquired a history of optional action did not bother me. Nor did using the term ‘human’ for a person who is a member of the Homo sapiens species bother me. So I guess I would be comfortable with using the term ‘human life’ to include any genetically viable human organism.

Cathy: That come close to what I could call a human life, depending on what you mean by a viable organism. I hope this means that you would consider a fertilized egg as a viable organism.

Pamela: A fertilized is certainly a viable organism in the sense that it can grow into a human within a womb. So we have a concept of a human life that we can both use to consider a fertilized egg as a human life, at least when it is implanted in a womb.

Jo: Altho you may not have a shared concept of a human life that applies to some borderline cases, such as a human clone, with some effort we could probably formulate one. Instead let us turn to what may be more significant, namely values and status issues. Conceptualizing a human life as including fertilized human eggs (including in vitro ones) settles some but not all status issues. It makes it eligible for considerations that the fertilized egg of a mouse does not have. It does not currently make it eligible to the same legal protections as an infant. Nor does the status human life automatically endow one with membership in the human community.

Cathy: If the human community includes all humans why would it not automatically include all human life?

Pamela: We may be using the word ‘human’ in different ways. In many contexts the word is used as an adjective; such as human heart, human cell, human rights, etc. None of these are members of the human community. When I use ‘human’ as a noun I am thinking of a human being. I was willing to call a fertilized egg a human life, but I do not think of it as a human being.

Cathy: I know that you think of a newborn infant as a human being. Was it not a human being just before it was born?

Pamela: I admit that saying a human life becomes a human being when it is born may seem arbitrary, but calling a fertilized egg a human being just sounds strange to me. I find birth the natural place to include a person as a member of the human community.

Jo: Again I want us to avoid problems with locutions and focus the more significant value and status issues. For the sake of our discussion let us include fertilized human eggs as members of the human community. Members within this (or any other) community can have a variety of statuses other than membership. Suppose we restrict the term ‘a human being’ to members after birth. This is an additional status, with some different eligibilities. Adult human is another status. Etc.

Cathy: I like this way of thinking about the human community. I do not like the way you want us to use ‘human being’, but for the purposes of this discussion I will use it as you have suggested. Clearly a human being and a fertilized egg are different statuses. You use the term ‘eligibility’ broadly to include eligibilities that are undesirable. Currently a fertilized is legally eligible for being discarded, but a human being is not. This is one the main things I object to. Even if we do not call a fertilized egg a human being, it is a human life, and it should not be eligible for being discarded.

Pamela: Even if we extended the concept of a human being to include a fertilized egg, I would not give a fertilized egg the same legal status as a born human being. Moreover not all human lives has the same statuses. Being born of non-citizens in the United States give a child the status of citizen, while being conceived here does not. This may be somewhat arbitrary but having this or some other definite and easily applied criteria is useful. Of course more than utility is involved in this and other status issues, especially when major values are involved. I suspect that our main difference is because you and I place different values on the life of a fertilized egg.

Jo: I think you are getting close to core of these value differences. I think that you can see these values they are linked to paraceptual claims about eternal persons or other matters. Can you also see that it is possible for two people to agree on all such claims and still have different values?

Pamela: I give a fertilized egg that is implanted in a womb a different status than an in vitro fertilized egg. In particular, since it is more likely to become a human being, I would make it illegal for its mother to smoke during pregnancy. I have a friend who would not restrict a pregnant woman’s eligibility in this manner. We seem to agree on the potential harm of smoking and other relevant paraceptual matters, but we still disagree about eligibilities for the statuses involved.

Cathy: I recognize that a fertilized egg that is implanted in a womb has a different status than an in vitro fertilized egg. Since I believe each is an eternal person, I do not think either should be eligible for being discarded. I believe that in vitro fertilization goes against God’s Will. My friend Bill disagrees, but primarily for paraceptual reasons. He does not think an in vitro egg is an eternal person.

Jo: Altho most theists believe that eternal persons are created by God, there is some disagreement among them as to when this happens. The propositions above indicate other possibilities for when and how an eternal person might emerge. I want both Cathy and Pamela to assume a fertilized egg became an eternal person upon being implanted in a womb. Would you then agree on it eligibilities?

Pamela: Believing this assumption would not change the eligibilities I would assign to the status of an implanted fertilized egg. I would definitely not give it the same legal protection as a human being. A budding eternal person is still a budding person. It does not yet have a noteworthy history of optional action in a dramaturgical pattern. It does not yet have much of a vested interest in this world. Its mother does have such an interest and her behavior potential takes a priority of a budding person’s.

Cathy: I would still want to discourage in vitro fertilization, but I would find it less objectionable. I would give an implanted egg the same legal status as a human being. Its vested interest in this world does not lessen its value. The behavior potential of a budding person is at least as important as that of a mature person. In fact, being unable to assert its eligibilities it may need more protection.

Jo: Altho I think your status disagreement are at least as much about values as about paraceptual matters, we have only made a start at bring either into focus. Moreover bringing them into focus is unlikely to move the two of you close to consensus. Nor have we considered a variety of other perspectives on these matters. Still I hope that you both have found what we have done useful. Perhaps later we can further explore this in more depth. In particular, I recommend the paper CPCS Plausibility Concept as a way of coming closer togete4ron paraceptual matters. I am not sure what might help in regard to values, other than an understanding of why you have difference and some thoughts about negotiating on policies an actions.

Activity: Gilbert and Dilbert agree that all humans who are not cloned are eternal persons but those who are cloned are not eternal persons. Gilbert advocates the policy of denying citizenship and a multitude of other rights to cloned humans. Dilbert advocates making their legal status the same as the status of any other human. Write a conversation in which Jo helps them bring their differences into better focus.

APPENDIX 3 THE PNDP PERSON CONCEPT

Deliberate Action: The PNDP functional person concept is essentially what I have taken as the paradigm case of the functional person concept that I use, and is thus is a special case of the one I am using. Unlike the person concept that I use, the PNDP person concept involves the concept of deliberate action. Ossorio (2006a) briefly characterizes deliberate action as intentional action in which the actor knows what he is doing and is doing it on purpose. This means that deliberate action is usually behavior in which the actor at least implicitly knows two or more options for acting. Furthermore the individual usually has varying degrees of wants in relation to these options. This concept also includes having the competence to attempt these actions and to distinguish it from other actions. To use the deliberate action description, the K-parameter would specify at least the behavior that was involved. Furthermore the W-parameter would also indicate this behavior. There are some indications that the parameters of a deliberate action description may involve more than that, perhaps including more aspects of what I call optional action.

Alternate Concept of Deliberate Action: Using this concept of deliberate action it is behavior in which the actor knows two or more behavior options for acting. Furthermore the individual usually has degrees of wants in relation to these options. This concept also includes having the competence to attempt these actions and to distinguish between them. To use the deliberate action description, the K-parameter would specify at least one option to what was done, even if only to say that the actor considered not doing it. Furthermore the W-parameter would indicate degrees of wants in relation to what was and was not done.

The PNDP Person Concept:

A person has a history in which deliberate action in a dramaturgical pattern is ubiquitous; where acting in a dramaturgical pattern means that a person assigns objects and events into positions in a drama of that person’s ongoing life. A person has sufficiently mastered a person concept to distinguish between persons and non-persons, at least most of the time. A person acquired the concept of a person by learning to act as a person in interaction with other persons. Moreover, a person knows how to act as a person in interaction with other persons.

(Ossorio 1998a, p14) also add a social condition on deliberate action which is not included in my concept of optional action. Altho perhaps this maxim is paraceptual rather than purely conceptual.

Maxim E5: To engage in a deliberate action is to participate in a social practice of the community.

Ossorio say that social practices are teachable learnable, do-able public forms of behavior usually involving more than one participant. Social practices are what there is to “do”. If one wants to do anything one selects from the things that are done, or else one invents a new form of behavior and gets it accepted as one of the things there is to do. (Ossorio 1998a, Maxim E5 and comments)

Optional Action: Personally I find he PNDP deliberate action concept somewhat out of focus (see CPCS Concept Parameters for a precise formulation of the focus parameter). In order to specify some transformations in a paradigm case formulation of the functional person concept I prefer, I used a concept of optional action that is more in focus for me than is the PNDP deliberate action concept. Optional action merely involves having knowledge and wants regarding at least two options when acting in a situation. It does not require any relation to social practices and is thus applicable to asocial individuals. Thus for the alternate concept all deliberate action is optional action, but an optional act would not necessarily be a socialized deliberate act. Conceptually, an individual might engage in optional action whether or not that that individual had ever encountered another who could engage in optional action. It might consider pausing to drink from the stream or to continue pressing on. It might consider scratching an itch with a stick or by looking for a tree to rub against. According to Maxim E5, the concept of deliberate action would seem to involve more than this, altho the connection between deliberate action and social practice depends on features of the social practice concept that I find somewhat vague.

There are obvious cases of optional actions that do not seem to involve participation in the social practices of any community. Some asocial aliens in science fiction engage in optional actions that do not depend on the social practices of any community. A creator of the universe, as conceptualized in monotheistic religions, would be an example of an individual who was thought of as having engaged in optional actions that were not forms of the social practices of any community. The existence of such individuals is a paraceptual matter, but regardless of existential concerns, there are reasons to have concepts for thinking about them. In fact, some people may be more interested in a broader concept that includes them than in one that does not.

The PNDP Person Concept: For the most part Ossorio seems to be working from a pre-empirical perspective that primarily involves developing concepts whose main applications would be towards persons that are human, altho he definitely does not limit the person concept to humans. It also includes any other individuals who interact in ways that involve deliberate action. While I take the community feature as optional, PNDP seems to take them as essential, since he elsewhere adds the feature below to the person concepts.

(1) What makes an individual a person is, paradigmatically, to have mastered the person concept. This involves learning to act as a person in interaction with other persons, which results in knowing how to act as a person in interaction with other persons and results in coming simply to be a person.
(Ossorio 1998a, p3)

(2) The primary function of the concept of a person is to guide the behavior of one person with respect to other persons. (Ossorio 1995, p 96 and various other places)

In (1) above, it would seem that being a person involves both knowing the person concept and having acquired it in a special manner. The acquisition part would not apply to the person concept as used with traditional concepts of God. Since (1) is qualified by ‘paradigmatically’, perhaps this allows a broad enough person concept to include God. I do not know to what extent parts of (1) are indispensable components of the PNDP person concept. The first sentence appears to be conceptual and indispensable. The second has a paraceptual flavor, but perhaps it is also part of the conceptualization. This is further complicated since the initial presentation of the concept of deliberate action was independent of the concept of a social practice. All of this could have been clarified had I been able to find a paradigm case formulation of the PNDP person concept with allowable transformations. Ossorio (2006b) seems to promise one, and what he says there makes it fairly clear what would be involved in what he would use as a paradigm. However he does not explicitly give a paradigm case formulation. In particular it is not clear what the allowable transformations would be. One major purpose of this present paper is to give such a formulation. This formulation used what I think is the paradigm case that Ossorio had in mind. However it also includes allowable transformations that will include individuals who would be classified as persons by another widely used person concept. It is unclear to me whether this would be acceptable to Ossorio, since it conceptually allows for persons who did not become person by being socialized.

References: A reader who wants more details PNDP concepts can consult the file entitled Concept Encyclopedia on the Descriptive Psychology section of conceptualstudy.org. For a comprehensive introduction to PNDP, see Shideler. For a deeper perspective, see various books from the collected work of Peter Ossorio. The Behavior of Person covers all the material in Shideler, but with nuances, she does not consider. More about PNDP and its applications, are developed in the series Advances in Descriptive Psychology. These books can be ordered from the Society for Descriptive Psychology website sdp.org.

Jaynes, Julian (1990) The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Boston: Houhgton Mifflin. Anyone who finds this book of interest might also be interested in the website (www.julianjaynes.org) of the Julian Jaynes Society.

Ossorio, Peter (1981) Notes on Behavior Descriptions. In K. Davis (Eds), Advances in Descriptive Psychology (Vol 1). Ann Arbor MI: Descriptive Psychology Press.

Ossorio, Peter (1995) Persons. Volume I. The Collected Works of Peter G. Ossorio. Ann Arbor MI: Descriptive Psychology Press.

Ossorio, Peter (1998a) Place. Volume III. The Collected Works of Peter G. Ossorio. Ann Arbor MI: Descriptive Psychology Press.

Ossorio, Peter (1998b) What there is, the way things are. In J, Jeffrey & R. Bergner (Eds.), Advances in Descriptive Psychology (Vol. 7, PP 7-32). Ann Arbor MI: Descriptive Psychology Press.

Ossorio, Peter (2006a) The Behavior of Persons. Volume V. The Collected Works of Peter G. Ossorio. Ann Arbor MI: Descriptive Psychology Press.

Ossorio, Peter (2006b) In A World of Persons and Their Ways. In K. Davis & R. Bergner (Eds), Advances in Descriptive Psychology (Vol. 8). Ann Arbor MI: Descriptive Psychology Press.

Putnam, Anthony (1981) Communities. In K. Davis (Eds), Advances in Descriptive Psychology (Vol. 1). Ann Arbor MI: Descriptive Psychology Press.

Shideler, Mary (1988) Persons, Behavior, and the World. New York: University Press of America

Papers: This present paper and my other papers prefixed with CPCS are on the conceptual papers section of my website. My email address is richardsinger3@sbcglobal.net all feedback is welcomed.