The Minimal Person
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) July 30, 2026 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21700984 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that personhood is not simply being a self but selfhood made publicly legible and socially stable, arising when language, Theory of Mind, reciprocal recognition, and institutions together turn a temporally extended self into someone who can be addressed, acknowledged, held accountable, and embedded in shared normative practices. Proposes that personhood can be derived constructively from selfhood rather than treated as a separate primitive, extending the author's earlier accounts of subjecthood and selfhood. |
Abstract
This paper argues that personhood is not just being a self, but selfhood made publicly legible and socially stable. It claims that language, Theory of Mind, reciprocal recognition, and institutions work together to turn a temporally extended self into a person who can be addressed, acknowledged, held accountable, and embedded in shared normative practices. The paper’s main move is to derive personhood constructively from selfhood rather than treating it as a separate primitive. In the trilogy, it is the final step after subjecthood and selfhood, showing how minded beings become persons within a social world. This paper builds on Paper I, The Minimal Bearer of Experience (Qiang Dai, Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21700483), which identifies the minimal bearer of experience, and Paper II, The Minimal Self (Qiang Dai, Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21700772), which explains how subjecthood becomes temporally extended through persistent self-modeling. It extends that constructive sequence to the emergence of personhood.