ADR-024: Agent, individual, self and person; four unities kept apart

Context

ADR-015 gave the record self-and-personhood, one word for “what a self or a person is and what makes one persist”. It was carried by 42 documents. The owner asked for a batch of readings on agency, control, the self and self-governance, and with it two distinctions:

• Agent, individual, self and person should not be synonyms.
• Behavioural integration, phenomenal unity, narrative unity and normative self-governance should be represented separately.

The single word made both conflations easy. A paper on personal identity over time (Parfit) and a paper on the pre-reflective minimal self (Gallagher) sat under one tag. A collective that pursues a goal was called a “Self” in one summary and an “agent” in a theory, with nothing in the record marking the difference.

Decision

Retire self-and-personhood. Keep four words for four things:

• agency: being an agent, meaning goals, action, control and the capacity to act.
• individuation: being one thing, including biological individuality and organisational closure.
• self: being a subject. It covers the minimal, bodily and pre-reflective self, self-models, and the self as process or as context.
• personhood: being a person. It covers personal identity over time, what matters in survival, and persons as bearers of reasons and responsibility.

Each blurb says what the word is not.

Add four words for the four unities:

• behavioral-integration: how many control systems act as one. It covers action selection, competition between habitual and goal-directed or automatic and willed control, hierarchical and feedback control, intertemporal conflict, and evidence accumulation.
• phenomenal-unity: the unity of experience.
• narrative-unity: the unity of a life as a story.
• self-governance: governing oneself by standards that are one’s own. It covers identification, planning agency, self-constitution, autonomy and authenticity.

Every word except behavioral-integration joins the philosophy group. That one is mostly cognitive science and neuroscience.

The retagging

• The retired word. All 42 documents that carried it were moved to self, personhood or both, with the replacement first wherever the old word was first.
• The unity words. Twenty-one further documents took one or more of them: Frankfurt, Velleman, the autonomy surveys, THEORY-029 and THEORY-040 took self-governance; Brooks, Minsky and Frijda took behavioral-integration; IIT and Dennett took phenomenal-unity.
• LIT-142. One forced choice was undone. Meincke on pregnancy is about whether a pregnant organism is one individual or two, and does not discuss persons, so it keeps individuation and takes neither new word.

Prose corrected

The retagging found sentences that ran the terms together, and they were corrected:

• Levin’s “Selves” (LIT-439, THEORY-043). They are goal-pursuing collectives. In this record’s terms that makes them agents and individuals, with no account of a subject.
• Shanahan’s selves (LIT-466). They pick out the same bearers as Goldstein and Lederman’s agents. That is not the claim that self is agent.
• LIT-460. Selfhood and personal identity are now separate questions.
• THEORY-054. It locates integration in “one’s” values, as SDT does, not in “the person’s”.

Alternatives considered

• Subtopics under one word, in the way the anthology placed flows-and-transport under generative-modeling. That would keep self-and-personhood as the parent. The owner’s point is that these are not species of one thing: an agent need not be a self, and a self need not be a person.
• A separate unities vocabulary on its own field. It would be checkable apart from topics, but it is a second axis every filing must remember. The unities are also the subject of the documents that carry them, which is what topics are for.
• Keep the word and fix the prose. The conflation is structural. One tag gives a browsing reader one page for Parfit and for Gallagher, and no wording in the summaries fixes that.