Construct · 3 fields · 6 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, three constructs Nearest construct by meaningbeingcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to person is being.
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In grammar, person is the category that marks who is speaking, who is spoken to, and who is spoken about: the first person (I, we), the second person (you), and the third person (he, she, it, they), shown on pronouns and often on verb endings. The Greek grammarian Dionysius Thrax listed person (Greek prosopon) among the properties of the pronoun and verb in his Techne grammatike around 100 BCE, and Emile Benveniste's 1966 Problemes de linguistique generale reworked it around the act of speaking, arguing that only the first and second persons are true persons of the dialogue while the third is a non-person. Here the word names a slot in the grammar of an utterance, not a being with rights, a member of the Trinity, or a self that persists through time.[1][2]
In law, a person is any entity that the legal system recognises as able to hold rights and owe duties, which covers human beings (natural persons) and also bodies such as companies, states, and other associations (juristic or artificial persons). Roman law already organised the first book of its teaching around the law of persons, de personis, in Gaius's Institutiones of about 161 CE, where persona tracked a being's legal standing, and John Dewey's 1926 The historic background of corporate legal personality traced how the same word was stretched to cover corporations as right-and-duty-bearing units. What counts here is legal capacity attached to an entity, so a corporation can be a person while, on this meaning, the word has nothing to do with grammar, divinity, or the metaphysics of the self.[3][4]
In philosophy, a person is the kind of being that is self-aware, rational, and morally accountable, and that counts as the same individual over time. John Locke defined a person in his 1689 An essay concerning human understanding as a thinking, intelligent being that can consider itself as itself across different times and places, tying personhood to continuity of consciousness rather than to the body or the soul, and Harry Frankfurt's 1971 Freedom of the will and the concept of a person located personhood in the capacity to reflect on and endorse one's own desires. The question here is what makes something a person and keeps it the same person, which is separate from the grammar of pronouns, the reach of legal rights, or the three persons of the Trinity.[5][6]
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