Persons: The emergence of Homo Socius

Social realities, persons, and language have co-evolved, with intrinsic ontological involvements with each other. This chapter presents these models and examines their interrelations and evolutionary and historical developments. The central model is that of convention: convention arises as a form of resolution of a fundamental epistemological problem that arises among social agents. The model is a descendent of Lewis’s model. Social realities are proposed as multiple kinds of conventions, with crucial forms having emerged historically. Persons emerge as historical-culturally constituted social agents, that have an intrinsic normative ontology. Language is a conventional means of interacting with social realities, and thus with the persons who constitute them. This is a very different model from standard models of utterances as transmissions of encoded messages. Persons are developmentally emergent processes. Development is an aspect of the same constructive processes that constitute learning. The emergence of developmental domains is characterized, and social, language, and person development are modeled. Among the crucial further developmental emergences within person and social processes are those of agency, rationality, personality and psychopathology, and ethics. Some of the consequences of this overall model for these normative emergences are examined; process and emergence models offer alternative perspectives on each of these domains.