ABSTRACT
In the practical psychology that we live everyday of our lives, there can hardly be a more salient entity than the person. Persons are at the very hub of everyday psychological reality; their actions and interactions, their social commitments and engagements, and their discursive musings, both private and public, are the very stuff of which practical commonsense psychology is made. How surprising it is, then, that, in recent theoretical treatments of this domain by cognitivists (the domain now thematized by them as folk psychology) the term person is hardly ever mentioned. One searches for it in vain in the index sections of works by any of the prominent theorists in this area, such as Dennett, Fodor, Searle, and others. The current controversy in cognitive science about the prospects for vindicating folk psychology has nothing at all to do with vindicating persons; it rather concerns the ontological status of folk psychological attitudes such as beliefs, intentions, desires, and the like. That the possessors of folk psychological attitudes may be at least as worthy of vindication as the attitudes they possess has not evidently occurred to the majority of cognitivists.
