Personhood Research Group
04 Sep 2026 - 29 Oct 2026
- A topic that has intrigued me for awhile, see personhood.
- So far pretty loosely defined:
right now, I have a list of research questions more than aims, per se. i.e. What is a person and how has that understanding been constituted differently in different times and places? What is life and how does it intersect with personhood? How do related disciplines like Animal Rights and Ecology understand the subject, in contrast to human personhood? And finally, how might any of this be applied to AI?
Readings
- This was Sarah Friends' initial list
- Marcel Mauss, "The Notion of Person" (1938)
- Ask Claude
- Here is a structured overview of Marcel Mauss's "A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; The Notion of Self" (1938):
Marcel Mauss, "The Notion of Person" (1938)
Context & Publication
- This was one of Mauss's last essays on the concept of a person, first delivered as the Huxley Memorial Lecture in 1938 and then printed in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 68 (1938).
- A transcription of the one-hour lecture later appeared in the edited volume The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History.
Central Argument
- Mauss argues that the very concept of the individual as a distinct, autonomous entity is a product of specific historical and cultural conditions, rather than a universal given.
- His essay argued that across time and space, everywhere, something like a self is present, but it is not always expressed by the concepts "me" or "I."
- In short, Mauss's theory explains personhood as a social and historical construction rather than a universal natural category.
The Historical Stages
- Mauss traces the evolution of the concept of the person through several stages:
1. Tribal/Primitive Societies: Personnage
- Mauss begins with North American (Pueblo in the south-west US, Kwakwaka'wakw on Vancouver Island) and Australian conceptions, rooted in personnage, or role in society determining identity.
- In traditional societies, the notion of the person is deeply embedded in social and cosmological frameworks, with individuals deriving their identity and status from their position within a complex web of kinship, clan, and spiritual relationships.
- Citing examples from Australian societies as well as from Native Americans — Zuñi, Kwakiutl, Winnebago — Mauss stressed the importance of names for the establishment of personhood. Names were not necessarily the hallmark of the individual, but rather of a persona, a fixed role or position within a society.
- Masks and ritual performances also expressed personhood: a person wearing a ceremonial mask could represent an ancestor, spirit, or social office. The role was recognized collectively, and the individual temporarily became the social personality associated with the mask. Mauss used such examples to show that the person was originally understood as a role or character within a structured social system.
2. Rome: Persona as Legal Category
- Mauss identified Roman law as an important stage in the development of personhood. The Latin word persona originally referred to a theatrical mask or role, and later became a legal term describing an individual with recognized rights and status. Roman law helped transform the person from a ritual character into a legal subject.
- However, not every human being had equal legal personhood — slaves had limited or no independent legal status, while citizens, family heads, and officials possessed different rights.
3. Stoics & Christianity: The Moral Self
- The lecture traces the evolution of the 'person' from the strictly delimited tribal 'role,' through the Roman persona — a mask or character in a dramatic play as well as a legal subject — all the way to the modern sense of a 'moral person' who is 'conscious, independent, autonomous, free and responsible.'
- The later development within Christian institutions of religion and morality leads to the emergence of a system in which the status and attributes of personhood are attached to an inner principle of monitoring and control: conscience.
- Roman law developed the legal person, Christianity strengthened the moral individual, and modern Western thought emphasized autonomy and rights.
4. Modern Western Individualism
- Mauss contrasted the relatively fixed conception of personhood in non-European societies with a dynamic vision of the changing idea of personhood in Western Europe, through Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christian theology, and ultimately the Enlightenment. The end result of this evolution was a conception of personhood in terms of individual consciousness rather than as the embodiment of set social relationships.
Key Concepts & Vocabulary
- Personnage: The self as social role or character, not an interior individual.
- Persona: Originally a theatrical mask; evolves into a legal and moral subject.
- Catégories de l'esprit humain:
- One of the principal difficulties in reading Mauss's essay is what he means when he speaks of catégories de l'esprit humain (categories of the human mind). His use of these categories can be traced to the French neo-Kantian school of philosophy, particularly Charles Renouvier and Octave Hamelin.
Intellectual Legacy & Critiques
- Mauss's classic essay remains to this day a central point of reference for all social scientists — social psychologists, social historians, sociologists, and anthropologists.
- However, his argument has been rejected by the overwhelming majority of anthropologists who reject any teleological dichotomy between European societies as essentially dynamic and non-European ones as static. That said, his insistence that conceptions of the person are culturally and historically constituted and constantly subject to change provided the foundation for most subsequent anthropological writing on the subject.
- The essay is historical, anthropological, and genealogical (in the Nietzschean sense), performing the goal of making the past and our preconceptions strange. The two most important conceptions of identity in philosophy and political theory — the rational, scientific Cartesian/Kantian identity and the political, Hobbesian legal person — are laid out as historical constructions. Nonetheless, nowhere does Mauss necessarily say that by revealing their contingent and constructed nature they are rendered powerless.
Key Takeaway
- Mauss's essay is foundational for anthropology, philosophy, and social theory because it denaturalizes the modern Western concept of the self, showing it to be the product of a long historical and cross-cultural evolution — not a timeless truth about human nature.
- Christopher Stone, "Should Trees Have Standing?" (1972 essay version) Jonathan Birch, The Edge of Sentience (2024, selected chapters) Joshua Bennett, Being Property Once Myself (2020, selected chapters) "What Lives? A Meta-Analysis of Diverse Opinions on the Definition of Life" (2026
W2 Should Trees Have Standing
- reading Should Trees Have Standing
- focus on legal rights – not the same thing as personhood in my book, although it relies on it.
We have been making persons of children although they were not, in law, always so. And we have done the same, albeit imperfectly some would say, with prisoners,9 aliens, women (especially of the married variety), the insane,10 Blacks, foetuses, 11 and Indians.
- footnote on embryos includes
Hohfeld's scheme that the "jural opposite" of someone's right is someone else's "no-right."
- that's a new one, relevant to today's LGM flame
W4 Property and Personhood
- reading by Margaret Jane Radin
- property rights and personhood intertwined for obvious reasons
- Hegel (?!)
Most people possess certain objects they feel are almost part of themselves. These objects are closely bound up with personhood because they are part of the way we constitute ourselves as continuing personal entities in the world. They may be as different as people are different, but some common examples might be a wedding ring, a portrait, an heirloom, or a house
- opposite: fungible property, not emotionally bound to an individual person
- Mentions commoditiy fetishism
In other words, under capitalism property itself is antipersonhood.
- ALright skimmed, didn't care for this type of theorizing (although it could be worse). Also I don't believe in property-attachment, as a fake-Buddhist I am against that sort of thing.
- I suppose my books are personal, and some people fetishize their car or whatnot. But you can't take it with you.
- Huh, thinking of code and open source. Might be too far afield.
- It seems that any piece of trtuly personal must itself be person-like, it has a soul of sorts. An independence, if its purely material then it is fungible.
W5 Making Up People
- Discussion
- Sachin: Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves
- misha: Simone de Bouvoir
- Simon: Oh this looks cool: neuronary
- Notes
- Classification of people. Implies always some purpose to it, often questionable.
They are moving targets because our investigations interact with them, and change them. And since they are changed, they are not quite the same kind of people as before. The target has moved. I call this the ‘looping effect’. Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before. I call this ‘making up people’.
These reflections on the classification of people are a species of nominalism. But traditional nominalism is static. Mine is dynamic; I am interested in how names interact with the named.
I would argue that the multiple personality of the 1980s was a kind of person previously unknown in the history of the human race. This is a simple idea familiar to novelists, but careful philosophical language is not prepared for it.
- ??? why? is philosophy unable to deal with change, or created concepts?
- Seems like social construction 101, which means I don't hate it but I don't see the point. All categories are constructed, some are just more obvious than others.
Transient mental illnesses can best be looked at in terms of the ecological niches in which they can appear and thrive. They are easy cases for making up people, precisely because their very transience leads cynics to suspect they are not really real, and so could plausibly be said to be made up.
- This is completely believable. Not sure what the point is. That mental illness is not some objective medical fact but a kind of social role – I mean sure, obviously?
By a parody of Nietzsche, two new kinds of people came into being, the hip and the square.
- say what?
- Ask Claude
- The "say what?" is a fair reaction — the line is easy to miss if you don't catch the thread Hacking is pulling. Here's what's going on:
- Hacking identifies Nietzsche as possibly the "first dynamic nominalist," citing an aphorism from The Gay Science: "unspeakably more depends on what things are called than on what they are."
- Nietzsche's point is that naming things creates new realities — new assessments, new truths, new kinds of things.
- The "hip" and "square" line is Hacking's quick, throwaway illustration of exactly this mechanism in action.
- Long ago, "hip" and "square" became common names in white middle-class culture, and by a parody of Nietzsche, two new kinds of people came into being — the hip and the square. As is the way of slang imported from another social class, both kinds had short shelf lives.
- The "parody of Nietzsche" framing is doing the work here. Nietzsche meant naming as something profound — world-constituting. The hip/square example is deliberately bathetic: the same mechanism (a name creates a kind of person) operating at the level of mid-century American slang. Once people started using those terms, you could be a hip person or a square person in a way you couldn't before the words existed. People began to identify with or against those categories, dress, talk, and organize their social lives around them. Then the slang faded and largely so did those particular "kinds of people."
- It's also a setup for his actual concern:
- he is focused on the human sciences — from sociology to medicine — and argues they are driven by engines of discovery that are also engines for making up people.
- The hip/square case is trivial and ephemeral; the clinical/scientific cases (multiple personality, autism, obesity) are weightier because they come backed by institutions, experts, bureaucracies, and medical authority — making the "made up" kinds of people much harder to escape or dissolve.
- Hm, I have arguments about the meaning of "hippie", if its just a few people in 1968 or a way of being that individuals embody in the present day.
- Curious notion 'several engines of discovery' All imperatives like Count! and Biologize!
- Sondra fat activism
- Reminds of of Bowker & Starr, Sorting Things Out
John Stuart Mill, the progenitor of the doctrine of natural kinds
- Really? Thought that went back to Aristotle or something?
- Ask Claude
- Your instinct is correct — the idea behind natural kinds goes back to antiquity, but Hacking's claim about Mill is defensible on narrower terminological grounds. Here's the breakdown:
- The underlying concept is ancient.
- There are two great traditions of natural-kinds realism: a premodern tradition instituted by Aristotle, to which Avicenna, Maimonides, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus belonged; and the modern tradition instituted by John Stuart Mill.
- Aristotle offers a this-worldly account: in his biological and logical works, he develops a hierarchical classification of species and genera, where kinds are unified by essences — intrinsic natures that explain characteristic capacities and behaviors, with a species defined by a form instantiated in matter.
- But the specific philosophical terminology is 19th century.
- Mill introduced the word 'Kind', with a capital K, to English philosophy, wanting to deflate the logical doctrine of the five predicables derived from Aristotle by Porphyry, which in 1843 was still a staple of English logic books.
- Mill was actually responding to and revising the Aristotelian tradition, not simply continuing it. And crucially,
- the phrase 'natural kind' itself was coined by John Venn in 1866 in his Logic of Chance.
- Mill himself did not use the phrase 'natural kind' — however, he does define 'Kind' in a philosophical sense, and his conception of Kinds was later christened as his doctrine of natural kinds.
- So what is Hacking actually claiming?
- Although enthusiasts for natural kinds might gesture back to Aristotle or Locke, it is generally accepted that the philosophical conception initiated with John Stuart Mill.
- Hacking's point is specifically about the modern analytic philosophical tradition of natural kinds —
- Hacking portrays the historical arc of thinking about natural kinds as beginning with Mill and reaching its apex with Putnam and Kripke.
- So you're right to push back, but the disagreement is partly about scope: Hacking isn't denying Aristotle did something in the vicinity — he's claiming Mill originated the specific modern philosophical framework. The narrower claim is reasonable; calling Mill "the progenitor" without qualification is a bit misleading.
A vigorous school of cognitive science argues that the tendency to treat kinds of things and kinds of people as if they had essences is innate in the human mind. It does not claim that there are metaphysical essences: only that we innately think and act as if there were. I am sceptical.
- what school is he talking about? sounds somewhat sensible
- Ask Claude
- The school Hacking is referring to is psychological essentialism — a well-established research program in cognitive science and developmental psychology. Here's what it amounts to:
- Psychological essentialism is the hypothesis that humans represent some categories as having an underlying essence that unifies members of a category and is causally responsible for their typical attributes and behaviors.
- Crucially — and this is exactly Hacking's point — it is "not the view that things have essences, but rather the view that people's representations of things might reflect such a belief (erroneous as it may be)."
- The key figures are Douglas Medin (who coined the term in 1989 with Ortony) and Susan Gelman, whose book The Essential Child (2003) is the major empirical treatment.
- Psychological essentialism is one of the most robust findings in cognitive science. From early childhood, people treat categories — biological species, social groups, psychiatric diagnoses — as possessing hidden essences: internal properties that are causally explanatory, unchangeable, and determinative of category membership.
- It is a prominent view within contemporary developmental psychology and cognitive science according to which children have an innate commitment to essentialism. If this view is correct, then a commitment to essentialism is an important aspect of human nature rather than a culturally specific commitment peculiar to those who have received a specific philosophical or scientific education.
- There's an internal debate about how innate this tendency is:
- some proposals suggest that essentialism is an effect of multiple other basic, early-emerging cognitive tendencies — e.g., the ability to track objects over time and causal-deterministic biases — which conspire during development and interact with relevant informational input to give rise to full-fledged psychological essentialism.
- Why Hacking is sceptical: his whole "looping effect" argument is precisely that people — unlike animals or minerals — respond to being classified, and thereby change. That makes them poor candidates for essentialism even as a useful cognitive heuristic. A view that we innately treat human kinds as having fixed hidden essences is exactly what his dynamic nominalism is pushing against.
- Not sure I understand the tension, Hacking's theory and essentialism seem perfectly compatible?
- Ask Claude
- There is actually a real tension here, and it operates on two levels:
- 1. What the cognitive science school is actually claiming
- Psychological essentialism is the hypothesis that humans represent some categories as having an underlying essence that unifies members of a category and is causally responsible for their typical attributes and behaviors.
- Crucially, this large body of research has led many psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers to conclude that essentialism is a fundamental feature of human cognition — a universal, robustly developing disposition that automatically guides inferences about many categories, including social categories, and that is not easily controlled.
- So the claim isn't just "essentialism exists" but that it is innate and automatic — i.e., that carving the world into kinds with fixed essences is something the mind does prior to and independent of social classification practices.
- 2. Why this is in tension with Hacking
- Hacking's whole project is premised on the instability of human kinds.
- The looping effect describes the interaction between classifications and the targeted "kinds of people." The idea is that classificatory practices induce reactions in the members of the human kind by enabling new intentional ways of being and acting. Tracking these changes requires revisions in the original classification, which may in turn lead to further changes in the members of the kind. Consequently, the interaction between classification and the affected members creates a feedback loop that renders the kind a moving target.
- If kinds are genuinely moving targets — historically contingent, unstable, constructed through feedback loops — then the cognitive essentialist picture is wrong about the object, not just wrong about our cognition. The essentialist school says: we treat kinds as having fixed underlying essences, and this tendency is built into us. Hacking says: the kinds themselves are not fixed, they shift in response to being classified. The tension is that:
- If essentialism were correct, classification would be tracking something stable and real.
- For Hacking, classification makes something that wasn't there before, and then that thing changes in response to being made.
- **3. Why you might think they're compatible (and why that's not quite right)**
- You could argue: "Fine, people think in essentialist ways (a psychological fact), but Hacking is making a metaphysical/sociological point about what the kinds actually are." These seem like different levels of analysis. But Hacking is specifically skeptical of the cognitive science claim because he thinks it naturalizes and stabilizes what is actually historical and contingent.
- Hacking's making up people project examines the way that human science classifications create new kinds of people — new ways for people to understand and conceive of themselves — that did not exist before they were named.
- If people innately essentialize categories, they will treat historically constructed kinds as if they had always existed and had fixed membership conditions — which is precisely the reification that Hacking is arguing against.
- So the scepticism toward the cognitive science school isn't arbitrary: it would, if true, provide a kind of cognitive alibi for essentialism about human kinds, obscuring the contingency and political stakes of classification that Hacking wants to foreground.
- Alright not going to argue with Claude here.
Galton aimed to measure genius but in fact he expelled it from our culture. It is part of the deep, ultimately Socratic notion of genius, that when it is measured on scales that stem from Galton..., true genius – I don’t hesitate to use that phrase – will be living somewhere else. It will blithely refuse to interact with questionnaires, institutions, experts and knowledge, rejecting classification. Ah, as you see, I have just bought into the Romantic notion of genius.
- Cute but what is the point? Also "genius" stands out like a sore thumb in his examples; everything else is a pathology. Genius may be equally a constructed category but the motives and dynamics are entirely different.
- Is this a macro version of Goffman's work on Stigma?
My intro
- Hi folks, I've been out of touch for awhile so just heard about this group, which seeems quite interesting. Personhood is something I've thought about and written about for a long time, see here for the collected works.
- Applying a protocol perspective to personhood seems very promising! Especially in an age of AI where we are marinating in pseudo-persons.
- In some sense persons are built directly with and from protocols; parent-infant interaction is the ur-protocol. (See the Kenneth Kaye book in my linked notes).
- As it happens my wife has studied medical anthropology with a focus on how different cultures treat terminated pregnancies, where the concept of personhood becomes challenged in different ways.
- personhood as a necessary fiction
- Personalization + (eg, thinking of trees or artworks as persons)
- Personalization - (thinking even humans are machines and only nominally persons or agents)
- Convo
- Yes! My thought was that questions of personhood can be divided into two piles: one more about how or why we treat nonhumans as persons (like the legal arguments in the current readings) or determine the boundaries of the personhood for humans (eg fetuses). What is the API of personhood.
- The other is more interior – what is it like to be a person, how are persons constructed, how does personhood work, what are the mechanisms? Given that we have to perform personhood on an ongoing basis, how do we do that?
- The first class is more amenable to a protocol approach for obvious reasons.
Random incoming
- Claude inanimate objects charged with a crime (I noticed that there's been a lot of discussion of legal rights of "inanimate" objects, but not much on their obligations or liabilities).
Ancient Athens. One of the five homicide courts sat at the Prytaneion and had jurisdiction over animals and inanimate things that had killed someone — a falling beam, a stone, a tree. If condemned, the object was formally cast beyond the borders of Attica. Aristotle mentions the court in the Constitution of the Athenians, and Demosthenes refers to the procedure.