ABSTRACT
The various ways in which philosophers have sought to understand the unity of a proposition are reflected in their views of other matters. In 1958 P. F. Strawson published what was to become an influential article entitled ‘Persons’. He later incorporated a modified version of it as the central chapter of his book Individuals. Approaching it, as most philosophers did, from the background of the recently published work of L. Wittgenstein and G. Ryle, it seemed at first that its central thrust was the same. Strawson’s article was, then, at least in part, a defence of the privacy of the mental. The problem, as he saw it, was to show how that thesis could be sustained without degenerating into a general scepticism or solipsism. Strawson arrived at the idea of private states spoken of in a public language because the problems with which he began were problems of individuation.
