On December 7, 2013 Wynn Schwartz spoke on “What Is A Person and How Can We Be Sure?” at the Personhood Beyond the Human conference at Yale University.
Wynn Schwartz, Ph.D. did his undergraduate studies at Duke University and received his Ph.D. in clinical and experimental psychology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He trained as a research psychoanalyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is on the core faculty of The Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology and the faculties of Harvard Medical School and Harvard Extension School.
Wynn’s research is within Descriptive Psychology, a discipline concerned with exploring and clarifying “The Person Concept”. This work is an attempt to create a common foundation for the human sciences by explicating and interrelating the fundamental concepts of Individual Person, Action, Language and World. An example can be found in his 1982 essay, “The Problem of Other Possible Persons: Dolphins, Primates, and Aliens.”
His experimental studies have focused on dreaming, memory and problem representation, and on hypnosis and episodic memory. His conceptual studies have centered on action and responsibility, the concept of “hypnosis”, and the parameters of empathy.
Wynn maintains a psychotherapy and supervision practice in Boston where he works with individuals and couples. His blog can be found: http://freedomliberationreaction.blog…
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The Personhood Beyond the Human conference was organized by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University, Yale’s Animal Ethics Group and Yale’s Technology and Ethics Group.
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Abstract: A Paradigm Case Formulation (PCF) of Persons will be offered. PCFs are useful when it is desirable to achieve a common understanding of a subject matter but where definitions prove too limiting, various, ambiguous or impossible. “Personhood” poses this definitional problem. A PCF should provide all competent users a conceptualization that can serve as a starting point of agreement. Generally, it should consist of the most complex case, an indubitable case, or a primary or archetypal case. It should be a sort of “By God, if there were ever a case of “X”, then that’s it.” By starting with a paradigm case, it becomes possible to delete or change features of the paradigm with the consequence that with each change some people may no longer agree that they are still talking about the same thing. But because of the shared paradigm, they can show where there is disagreement. I will offer the PCF of persons that is used in Descriptive Psychology.
A “Person” is an individual whose history is paradigmatically a history of Deliberate Action in a Dramaturgical Pattern. Deliberate Action is a form of behavior in which a person (a) engages in an Intentional Action, (b) is cognizant of that and (c) has chosen to do that. A person is not always engaged in a Deliberate Action but has the eligibility to do so. The Dramaturgical Pattern implies that a course of living makes sense.
Image: http://www.chicanschoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/light-bulb.jpg
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