Introduction
Peter G. Ossorio (1926–2007) was a psychologist and philosopher best known for developing Descriptive Psychology (DP) – a conceptual framework for understanding behavior and “persons”. Ossorio’s Descriptive Psychology is a pre-empirical, theory-neutral approach that aims to systematically describe the interrelated concepts of individual person, behavior (as intentional action), language, community, and world/reality. Rather than formulating speculative theories, DP focuses on clearly defining these fundamental concepts as a necessary foundation for any science of mind or behavior. Over the decades, Ossorio and the DP community applied this framework beyond clinical psychology – including in artificial intelligence, questions of non-human personhood, and debates in the philosophy of mind. This report surveys the influence of Ossorio’s Descriptive Psychology in these areas, highlighting its role in shaping AI conceptual models, its treatment of intentionality and agency, its application to artificial or animal “persons,” and its impact on broader philosophical views of mind and consciousness.
Descriptive Psychology in AI and Computational Frameworks
Descriptive Psychology as a Conceptual Framework: DP was explicitly designed to provide psychology with a rigorous conceptual scaffold – “a foundational conceptual framework” akin to those in other sciences. This clear articulation of key notions like action, knowledge, and personhood has proven useful in artificial intelligence and cognitive modeling. In fact, DP “has been used by professionals around the world to solve problems in the fields of artificial intelligence”. Ossorio’s approach offered AI researchers a way to represent human behavior not just in terms of data or stimulus-response, but in terms of meaningful action and context. For example, Ossorio was both a psychologist and a proficient computer programmer who secured contracts with agencies like NASA to develop AI systems. One descriptive psychologist recalls that Ossorio’s work was “applied by him to topics as far ranging as artificial intelligence software for NASA”, illustrating the direct influence of DP in AI projects. In these projects, Ossorio’s person-centered concepts likely informed how AI software components were designed to handle complex decision-making and language understanding tasks.
Knowledge Representation and Paradigm Case Formulation: A hallmark of DP is its paradigm case formulation method – defining a concept (like “person” or “intentional action”) by describing a prototypical example and its variations. This method has been leveraged in AI to define what counts as an “intelligent agent” or a “person-like” system. As early as the 1960s, NASA posed a provocative question to Ossorio: “If green gas on the moon speaks to an astronaut, how do we know whether or not it is a person?”. This scenario — essentially asking how to recognize an alien or artificial intelligence as a person — prompted Ossorio to articulate a formal criterion for personhood independent of human biology. His answer was to outline the paradigm case of a person (a normal adult human) and identify what characteristics an entity must have to fall into the category. This approach influenced AI conceptual frameworks by providing clear criteria for person-like agency, which is crucial in AI fields like autonomous agent design and human-computer interaction. Indeed, later DP researchers integrated these ideas into knowledge engineeringfor AI. In a DP volume on AI, John Jeffrey (1990) discussed “Knowledge Engineering: Theory and Practice,” using DP concepts to systematically define domains for expert systems. By leveraging DP’s precise definitions, AI developers could more reliably encode knowledge about actions, intentions, and social contexts into computational models.
AI Modeling of Behavior and Cognition: Because Descriptive Psychology insists that “the world makes sense, and so do people”, it encourages AI models that exhibit coherent, reason-driven behavior. Rather than viewing intelligence as just algorithmic processing, DP frames it in terms of an agent participating in a world of meaningful situations. Ossorio’s Person Concept is essentially a template for an intelligent agent: it portrays persons as entities who engage in deliberate action within a complex environment, guided by reasons and evolving over a personal history. This has influenced AI by highlighting features like goal-directedness, context-sensitivity, and the ability to make choices. For instance, DP’s conceptual rigor has been noted as useful in AI subfields such as software engineering and knowledge-based systems, where clear definition of “behavior” and “intentionality” can improve the design of intelligent software. In sum, Descriptive Psychology provided AI researchers with ontological clarity – a well-defined vocabulary for modeling cognition and action – which has been applied in building expert systems, human-like AI agents, and even long-range planning software for organizations (NASA included).
Intentionality, Agency, and Action in Ossorio’s Framework
A core contribution of Ossorio’s Descriptive Psychology is its robust account of intentionality, agency, and action, which has direct relevance for AI and cognitive science. Ossorio asserted that behavior is to be understood as intentional action – meaning that when a person acts, they typically do so deliberately, for reasons, with an understanding of what they’re doing. In his major work The Behavior of Persons, Ossorio mapped out the concept of “Persons” as individuals whose history is, paradigmatically, a history of Deliberate Action”. This view departs from purely mechanistic, or behaviorist models and instead treats the person as an agent. The DP framework thus provides a terminology for talking about mentalistic concepts (intentions, choices, reasons) in a disciplined way that can inform AI systems designed to emulate or recognize such agency.
Defining Deliberate Action: Ossorio defined a deliberate action as a behavior where the agent (a) performs an intentional act, (b) is cognizant of doing so, and (c) does it by choice. In other words, an action is intentional not just by an outside observer’s standards, but from the agent’s own perspective – the agent knows what they are doing and could have done otherwise. This nuanced definition has implications for AI: any AI system meant to be an agent (for example, a robot or software assistant) would need to meet some analogue of these criteria to be considered acting “intentionally.” DP scholars further elaborated that motivation for action can be classified into categories – hedonic (seeking pleasure/avoid pain), prudent (practical self-interest), aesthetic, and ethical – and importantly, the latter two involve genuine choice and judgment. “Aesthetic and ethical motivations are only relevant when deliberate action is possible since … [they] require the eligibility to choose or refrain, to potentially deliberate about the desirable course to follow”. This insight underscores that true agency involves the capacity to weigh options and ideals, not just react to stimuli. AI researchers influenced by such ideas might strive to design agents that can simulate decision-making with ethical or aesthetic considerations (for instance, AI that can follow moral guidelines or adapt to user preferences creatively).
Intentionality and AI Development: By emphasizing that people have reasons for what they do, Ossorio’s work injects into AI development the idea that an intelligent system should be explainable in terms of reasons and goals. Ossorio famously maintained that people make sense – human behavior is not random but intelligibly connected to the person’s intentions and the circumstances. This perspective aligns with modern AI interests in explainability and goal-driven agents. An AI designed under a DP-inspired framework would not be a black-box that merely outputs behavior; it would ideally have representable “beliefs” or “desires” that correspond to its actions, making it conceptually transparent. Indeed, those who studied with Ossorio report that DP gave them “concepts that allowed a systematic analysis of personal agency and human freedom of choice,” freeing them from oversimplified deterministic models. This kind of systematic understanding of agency can influence AI by encouraging systems that incorporate internal decision modules (to mimic choosing) and situational awareness (to mimic knowing what one is doing).
Agency in a World of Meaning: Another notable aspect of Ossorio’s approach is the insistence that actions occur in a meaningful context or what he called a “dramaturgical pattern” (i.e. a narrative structure in a social world). This resonates with AI approaches that model environments, social dynamics, or narrative understanding. It suggests that to get true intentional agency in AI, one must also model the world of the agent – including other agents, social practices, and language. DP’s influence here is more conceptual than technical: it reminds AI and cognitive science that intentionality is inherently about something (about states of affairs in the world) and that any model of mind should incorporate that about-ness. Ossorio’s training in philosophy (under Rudolf Carnap) and appreciation of Wittgenstein is evident in DP’s stance that an action’s meaning comes from its role in shared “language games” or social practices. This philosophical grounding offers AI a way to frame intentionality not as an occult inner state, but as part of a publicly observable pattern of behavior within a context. Modern AI research on intentional agentsand planning systems echoes these ideas, treating an agent’s behavior as the outcome of intentions in context (for example, the belief-desire-intention (BDI) models in AI have a similar spirit of explicit intentional stance). While Ossorio’s work was not mainstream in AI, it laid conceptual steppingstones: by treating agency and intentional action rigorously, he indirectly influenced how designers of intelligent systems articulate the goals and choices of those systems.
Descriptive Psychology and Non-Human Personhood
One of the most intriguing extensions of Descriptive Psychology is its application to non-human entities – asking whether animals, hypothetical aliens, or artificial intelligences could be considered “persons.” Ossorio’s framework deliberately separates the concept of personhood from any specific species or biological form, focusing instead on the capabilities and characteristics that define a person. In DP, a “person” is not equivalent to “a human being”; rather, a person is any individual that fits the paradigm case (or sufficiently close) of an agent who participates in the community of thinkers and actors. This has made DP particularly relevant in debates about animal rights and AI ethics, where the status of potentially intelligent non-humans is considered.
Criteria for Personhood: Using the paradigm case formulation, Ossorio and colleagues spelled out the prototypical features of a person. The paradigm case of a person(essentially, a normal adult human) is described as “a linguistically competent individual able to engage in Deliberate Action in a dramaturgical pattern”, with the ability to take on hedonic, prudent, ethical, and aesthetic perspectives in guiding their actions. From this paradigm, DP allows for various derivative cases of persons who might lack one feature or another (for example, a person without language would be considered a “deficit case” person, but still a person in a broader sense). Crucially, this formulation “allows for nonhuman persons, potential persons, nascent persons, [and] manufactured persons”– the latter covering artificially created intelligences. In short, if an entity behaves in ways that make it intelligible as an intentional agent (can act deliberately, communicate, participate in rule-governed practices, etc.), then Descriptive Psychology provides a vocabulary to call that entity a person (or at least to debate its personhood in a structured way).
Artificial Persons: The DP community has explicitly explored the notion of artificial persons. In Advances in Descriptive Psychology (Vol.5, 1990), for example, Andrew Putman authored a chapter titled “Artificial Persons,” examining how DP’s person concept could apply to AI or computer systems. This work considered what it would mean for an AI to count as a person and what kinds of status (legal, moral) such an “artificial person” might hold. The very inclusion of this topic in DP research indicates that Ossorio’s ideas were being actively applied to emerging questions about AI rights and identity even decades ago. Contemporary scholars continue this line of inquiry. For instance, Wynn Schwartz (a student of Ossorio) argued “it is reasonable to include non-humans as persons and to have legitimate grounds for disagreeing where the line is properly drawn”, so long as we are using a clear paradigm-case definition of person. His work at a 2013 Yale conference “Personhood Beyond the Human” demonstrated how DP can frame debates on whether advanced animals (e.g., great apes, dolphins) or hypothetical AI could be granted personhood. By setting out explicit criteria, DP helps move the personhood discussion beyond vague intuitions to a more principled comparison of candidates (human or otherwise) against the paradigm case.
Legal and Ethical Discussions: The influence of DP on non-human personhood is also evident in legal and ethical scholarship. Recent papers on AI and law have followed “the descriptive psychology method (Ossorio’s paradigm case formulation)” to assess whether a self-conscious AI could be treated as a person under the law. For example, Hadzi (2020) speculates about AI as a “non-human person” and explicitly uses Ossorio’s criteria to ask at what point an AI system might be considered capable of committing crimes (and thus bear legal responsibility). The DP paradigm case approach provides a structured way to discuss such scenarios: rather than arguing abstractly, one compares the AI’s capacities to those of the paradigm person and identifies where it falls short (language, choice, emotional understanding, etc.). Similarly, animal rights advocates have found DP useful. Ossorio’s student Schwartz notes that if we grant certain animals person status, we must reconsider how we treat them (e.g. keeping elephants or cetaceans in captivity could be seen as slavery). Thus, DP’s influence is palpable in the Nonhuman Rights Project and other movements where scholars have cited Ossorio’s work in briefs and arguments about chimpanzee or dolphin personhood. By providing a rigorous concept of person, DP equips these debates with a common reference point. Even NASA’s hypothetical “green gas on the moon” question acknowledged “the possibility of a person who does not share human embodiment”, a radical idea in the 1960s that Ossorio’s framework was uniquely suited to address.
In summary, Descriptive Psychology expands the conversation on personhood to include animals, aliens, and AI, on the condition that they exhibit the defining behaviors of persons. This has helped shape discussions in AI ethics about at what point an advanced AI might merit moral consideration or legal rights. It also bridges to animal cognition research by asking how closely an animal’s behavior matches the paradigm of a person and what ethical obligations follow if it does. Through these applications, Ossorio’s influence persists in any discourse that asks “What is a person, really, and who (or what) can count as one?”.
Impact on the Philosophy of Mind
Beyond its applications to AI and personhood, Descriptive Psychology has made contributions to broader issues in the philosophy of mind – particularly concerning consciousness, cognition, and the nature of persons. Ossorio’s stance was often a reaction against reductionist or mechanistic views of mind. He argued that many puzzles in psychology (and philosophy) come from conceptual confusions and could be resolved by more careful description of how mental concepts operate in our lives. In this sense, DP aligns with the later Wittgensteinian tradition: “the clear description of something leaves little more explanation needed.” By clearly describing, for example, what it means to be conscious of something or to act intentionally, DP aims to dissolve the mystery that fuels endless theoretical debates.
Consciousness and Deliberation: In DP, consciousness is not treated as an inexplicable private “feeling” separate from behavior; it is woven into the definition of personhood and deliberate action. A person is an agent who can not only act, but know they are acting and consider alternative actions. Thus, basic self-awareness is built into the idea of a person. Ossorio’s framework distinguishes between actions done intentionally with awareness and those that are not – a distinction that mirrors philosophical discussions of conscious vs. unconscious processes. For instance, DP notes that certain motivations (like ethical or aesthetic choices) typically involve conscious deliberation, whereas others (like hedonic pleasure-seeking) might be more automatic. In doing so, it provides a structured way to talk about free will and volition, topics traditionally in the realm of philosophy of mind. By defining when an agent is acting freely (deliberately) versus when they are simply behaving, DP offers a conceptual resolution to the issue of what it means to “have a choice.” This has philosophical significance: it locates freedom in the ability to participate in the social practices of giving reasons and making judgments, rather than in some metaphysical indeterminism. The influence here is subtle but important – it shifts discussion from looking for a mysterious “uncaused cause” in the brain to understanding the role of personal choice in human affairs.
Personhood and the Mind-Body Problem: Descriptive Psychology’s person-centered ontology has implications for the mind-body problem. Ossorio held that persons and their characteristic activities (like language, reasoning, inventing) constitute a domain of reality that cannot be explained away by neurophysiology. DP does not deny that people have brains, but it insists that the concepts needed to describe persons (intentions, significance, commitments, etc.) are not reducible to physical concepts. As one DP commentary puts it, attempts to reduce behavior to neural events “eliminate the conceptual legitimacy of… persons as individuals who make choices based on reasons… [and] the notion that making such choices is fundamental to deliberate action in worlds that have meaning.”. This is a direct engagement with philosophy of mind: it’s a stance against strict reductionism or eliminative materialism. Ossorio, much like philosophers of mind such as John Searle or Thomas Nagel, would argue that first-person perspective and intentional states are real features of the world that require their own description. In DP terms, the “world of persons” is a distinct part of reality, one that includes culture, language, and subjective perspective, and you cannot capture it adequately with only the concepts of physics or biology. By articulating this view, DP has contributed to a form of non-reductive naturalism in the philosophy of mind: the mind is understood through the person (the whole agent in context) rather than through isolated internal “mental objects.” Consciousness, in this light, is the state of being a deliberate actor in a world of significance, not a separate ether. This idea resonates with certain streams of thought in philosophy, for example, the phenomenological idea that experience is tied to an embodied agent, or the pragmatist idea that mind is relational and action oriented.
Cognition and Intentionality: Philosophers of mind often discuss intentionality – the “aboutness” of mental states. DP approaches intentionality in a very practical way: instead of treating it as an abstract property of mental representations, it embeds intentionality in intentional action. To have an intention, in DP, is fundamentally to be oriented toward bringing about some state of affairs in the world (or to participate in some social practice). This pragmatic handling of intentionality has influenced cognitive modeling by foregrounding the idea that understanding a mind means understanding what the agent is up to. It dovetails with philosophical arguments that you cannot define beliefs or desires except in relation to the actions they would prompt in certain circumstances. Indeed, Descriptive Psychology’s entire framework can be seen as an extended analysis of the intentional stance (to borrow Daniel Dennett’s term): it provides formal tools for taking the intentional stance toward any agent, human or otherwise, by specifying the agent’s possible actions, knowledge, and values. Ossorio himself engaged with philosophical issues directly in some writings, addressing topics like the logic of mental states and the nature of language. His work provided a way to reconcile the subjective and objective points of view: one can describe a person’s subjective perspective (their beliefs, desires, feelings) in an objective, third-person usable form without denying the reality of that perspective. This has impacted philosophical discussions on topics like the definition of personhood (as noted above) and the analysis of psychological states. For example, if one asks, “What is anger?” or “What is thinking?”, a Descriptive Psychologist would answer by describing the patterns of behavior and significance that constitute those states, rather than searching for a neurochemical or purely introspective definition. This approach complements philosophical analytic methods, bringing clarity to mental concepts by linking them to observable patterns in the world of persons.
Academic Reception: While Descriptive Psychology has been somewhat “psychology’s best kept secret”, it has quietly influenced thinkers in various disciplines. Philosophers of science have noted Ossorio’s critique of psychology’s lack of a proper foundational ontology, a point which intersects with philosophy of mind when considering whether psychology should reduce to neuroscience or establish its own basic concepts. Moreover, DP has been cited in interdisciplinary works on ethics and technology. The concept of personhood from DP is now a reference point in discussions ranging from AI ethics (as seen in the works by Hadzi 2020, and others) to legal theory (debating the status of non-human entities). By formalizing the person concept, DP provided philosophers a structured alternative to define persons not by metaphysical substance (soul or DNA) but by functional criteria of agency and social participation. This enriches philosophical debates on personal identity and consciousness by suggesting that being a person is role-based and narrative, not just a matter of having a certain brain. Thus, even though Descriptive Psychology originated outside mainstream philosophy, its influence on philosophy of mind is evident wherever scholars grapple with defining consciousness, intentionality, and personhood in clear, behavioral terms.
Conclusion
Peter Ossorio’s Descriptive Psychology has played a multifaceted role at the intersection of psychology, AI, and philosophy. It established a conceptual framework that has guided the design of AI systems and computational models of cognition by insisting on clarity about what counts as an agent, an action, or a meaningful state. Ossorio’s nuanced treatment of intentionality, agency, and action provided tools for AI researchers to model intelligent behavior as something done on purpose and for reasons, not merely as output of algorithms. His ideas have been directly applied in building knowledge-based systems and were even incorporated into NASA’s AI endeavors. Furthermore, Descriptive Psychology has profoundly influenced discussions of non-human personhood: its paradigm case methodology allows scientists and ethicists to systematically ask whether a dolphin, a chimpanzee, or a future AI might qualify as a “person”. In doing so, DP has provided a common language for debates in animal rights and AI ethics, explicitly shaping arguments in academic and legal contexts about the status of non-human intelligences. Lastly, the DP framework has contributed to the philosophy of mind by reframing issues of consciousness and cognition in terms of describable patterns of action and significance. It champions a view of humans (and person-like entities) as choice-making, perspective-taking beings in a world of meaning, a view that stands as a corrective to purely reductionist narratives. In essence, Peter Ossorio’s Descriptive Psychology bridges the gap between human psychology and emerging intelligences, reminding us that to build or recognize a mind, one must first know how to describe a mind. Its influence endures in any inquiry that asks not just how minds work in the abstract, but what a mind (or a person) truly is.
Sources: Descriptive Psychology literature and analyses, interdisciplinary works on AI personhood , and commentaries on Ossorio’s contributions .