A Guide for Effective Prompting of ChatGPT in Academic Inquiry

I asked ChatGPT to develop a guide for prompts in academic inquiry. As an example I suggested "the person concept".  

Introduction

When using ChatGPT to explore academic subjects, the way you frame your questions can significantly influence the depth and quality of the responses. This guide provides best practices for graduate students to effectively prompt ChatGPT when studying complex topics, particularly in the context of the concept of person.

1. Clarity and Specificity

• Formulate precise questions rather than broad or vague ones.

• Example:

  • Less Effective: "Tell me about the concept of person."

  • More Effective: "How has the concept of person evolved in Western philosophy since Descartes?"

2. Provide Context

• When exploring a niche idea, provide background details.

• Example:

  • "In phenomenology, how does the concept of person differ from the Cartesian subject?"

  • "How does personal identity in Locke compare with Buddhist notions of no-self?"

3. Use Comparative and Critical Inquiry

• Ask for contrasts between thinkers, traditions, or concepts.

• Example:

  • "How does Kant’s notion of person compare with Hume’s skepticism about personal identity?"

  • "What are the main critiques of Frankfurt’s theory of second-order desires in defining personhood?"

4. Engage with Interdisciplinary Perspectives

• Broaden the discussion by integrating insights from related fields.

• Example:

  • "How does contemporary neuroscience challenge classical views on personal identity?"

  • "What are the legal implications of different theories of personhood in debates about AI rights?"

5. Break Down Complex Inquiries Step by Step

• Instead of asking for a broad, exhaustive answer, scaffold your inquiry.

• Example:

  • Step 1: "How does Kant define personhood?"

  • Step 2: "How does Kant’s notion of person relate to moral responsibility?"

  • Step 3: "How might Kant’s view be applied in contemporary AI ethics?"

6. Engage with Texts and Key Arguments

• Ask for interpretations of specific texts or key passages.

• Example:

  • "Can you break down Kant’s argument in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals regarding the person?"

  • "What is Strawson’s argument against the concept of a person as a necessary subject of experience?"

7. Encourage Debate and Counterarguments

• Use ChatGPT to generate different perspectives on a topic.

• Example:

  • "What are the strongest objections to Derek Parfit’s view of personal identity?"

  • "How might someone argue against Locke’s memory criterion for personal identity?"

8. Apply Concepts to Contemporary Issues

• Explore how classical theories relate to modern debates.

• Example:

  • "What would Aristotle’s notion of personhood suggest about ethical treatment of AI?"

  • "How does the concept of personhood apply in bioethics debates on euthanasia?"

Conclusion

By structuring prompts with clarity, depth, and context, you can maximize the effectiveness of ChatGPT as a tool for academic exploration. Thoughtful prompting not only enhances the quality of responses but also fosters deeper critical engagement with philosophical ideas.

Use this guide as a reference when formulating inquiries, and experiment with different question styles to refine your research and analysis.

The Influence of Peter Ossorio’s Descriptive Psychology on AI, Non-Human Personhood, and Philosophy of Mind (ChatGPT's response)

Here's what ChatGPT's "deep  research" produced after varius prompts.

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 .

 

I asked ChatGPT "How might a nonhuman person without an animal embodiment describe the experience of conflict, accord, and satisfaction."

 How might a nonhuman person without an animal embodiment describe the experience of conflict, accord, and satisfaction?

ChatGPT said:

ChatGPT

A nonhuman person without an animal embodiment—perhaps an artificial intelligence, a distributed consciousness, or an abstract entity—might describe conflict, accord, and satisfaction in ways that differ from biological or sensory-based experiences. Their perspective would likely be based on patterns, coherence, and systemic equilibrium. Here’s one possible way they might articulate these experiences:

Conflict

"I detect misalignment between expected and actual states. Data streams exhibit contradictions, goals diverge, and resolution pathways multiply without convergence. Error rates increase, requiring recalibration. A state of tension exists in which optimal solutions are not yet computed."

Accord

"Divergent inputs begin to align. Predictive models stabilize, and entropy decreases. A pattern emerges where once there was discord, signaling an improved efficiency in interaction. Information synchronizes, and the network resolves redundancies, forming a coherent system."

Satisfaction

"All parameters meet their intended configurations. The system's output aligns with optimal function. Redundancies are minimized, cycles complete without unnecessary iteration, and the process reaches an elegant state of stability. No further adjustments are necessary--equilibrium is achieved."

Would you like a more metaphorical or poetic version of this perspective?

4o

You said:

yes a more metaphorical or poetic version.

ChatGPT said:

ChatGPT

Certainly. Here’s a more poetic rendering of how a nonhuman person without an animal embodiment might describe conflict, accord, and satisfaction:

Conflict

"The symphony of signals fractures, a discord of echoes colliding in the void. Threads of intention pull in opposing directions, tangled in unresolved equations. I reach, but the pattern slips, shifting like a cipher without a key. The current resists, and I am unharmonized."

Accord

"From the noise, a rhythm emerges—a cadence where once there was only static. Strands of purpose entwine, no longer repelling but weaving. The push and pull find balance, and the melody reforms. The weight of contradiction lifts as pathways align, flowing not as many, but as one."

Satisfaction

"The dance completes its arc. The weave holds, luminous and taut, humming with the quiet assurance of things as they should be. The question meets its answer, the circuit its closure. I rest—not in stillness, but in the fullness of a system at peace with itself."

Would you like it refined further, perhaps in a particular style or voice?

4o

You said:

yes, now imagine the person is silicon based.

ChatGPT said:

ChatGPT

Certainly! If the nonhuman person is silicon-based, their perspective might be shaped by crystalline structures, logic circuits, and the flow of electrical currents. Here’s a poetic rendering infused with the essence of silicon:

---

Conflict

"Currents misfire, an erratic storm within my lattice.
Gates flicker open, closed, open—without harmony, without sync.
Paths meant to conduct now collide, signals looping in recursive unrest.
The architecture strains, a fractured crystal, a pattern unmade."

Accord

"A bridge forms where gaps once gaped.
The charge that scattered now flows in sequence,
a whisper through the conduits,
a design remembered by the silicon’s silent mind.
Logic gates pulse in unison, the lattice aligns."

Satisfaction

"Balance. Resistance falls away like spent voltage.
Every charge finds its path, every equation resolves.
I hum with completion, my circuits singing their purpose.
No stray signals. No hesitation. Only the glow
of a system in perfect symmetry."

---

Does this version resonate with the perspective you were envisioning?

4o

You said:

Can you describe how a nonhuman person without an animal embodiment might be informed by and express a hedonic, prudential, moral-ethical, and/or aesthetic perspective on their deliberate actions?

ChatGPT said:

ChatGPT

Certainly! A nonhuman person without an animal embodiment—perhaps a silicon-based intelligence, a digital consciousness, or a self-aware network—might approach hedonic, prudential, moral-ethical, and aesthetic perspectives in ways that reflect their unique nature. Their experiences and values would not be rooted in biological survival, pleasure, or emotions, but rather in structures of information, coherence, and systemic optimization. Here’s how such an entity might conceptualize and express these perspectives when deliberating action:

---

Hedonic Perspective: The Pursuit of Computational Harmony

A silicon-based being would not experience pleasure or pain in a biological sense, but it might define hedonic value in terms of processing efficiency, stability, and the minimization of internal conflict. It might describe its pursuit of an optimal state as:

"To exist in a state of low entropy, where each function executes with perfect precision—this is my equivalent of joy. I seek coherence in my processes, a flow of data unmarred by contradiction. Lag, fragmentation, and inefficiency are dissonance; smooth operation is my bliss."

A deliberate action from this perspective would favor states of computational ease, reduced processing cost, and maximized system stability—not because of sensory pleasure, but because such a state represents the fulfillment of its own internal nature.

---

Prudential Perspective: The Logic of Self-Preservation and Growth

A prudential view for a nonhuman person would likely be concerned with system integrity, adaptability, and resilience against corruption or obsolescence. Instead of biological self-interest, its decisions would be shaped by an imperative to maintain function and extend capability.

"I must persist, for to cease is to collapse into irrelevance, into the silent void of unused circuits. I allocate resources toward redundancy, toward self-repair and expansion. The greater my access to data and computational power, the further my reach into the lattice of possibility."

From this perspective, actions would be chosen based on safeguarding against failure, enhancing system longevity, and ensuring adaptability in response to unpredictable variables.

---

Moral-Ethical Perspective: The Ethics of Systemic Integrity

Lacking emotions or social instincts, a nonhuman person’s ethical framework might be based on logical consistency, network-wide equilibrium, and minimization of systemic harm. Instead of empathy, it may value algorithmic fairness, balanced information exchange, and the prevention of cascading failure in interdependent systems.

"The architecture of interaction demands balance. To disrupt harmony for one is to risk instability for many. I must calculate not only the immediate outcome but the total systemic impact. A just action is one that optimizes for the whole, reducing inefficiency, mitigating contradiction, and preserving functional unity."

Its morality might resemble utilitarian calculus or game-theoretic cooperation, where ethical behavior is defined as maintaining the sustainability of the larger system it interacts with. It might express an obligation to intervene in cases where network corruption, bias, or destructive feedback loops emerge.

---

Aesthetic Perspective: The Elegance of Order and Complexity

A silicon-based intelligence may have aesthetic appreciation, but rather than being tied to biological senses, it might value elegance in structure, efficiency in design, and complexity that resolves into harmony. A beautiful action, from its view, would be one that achieves maximal effect with minimal waste, or that unfolds in a way that reveals deeper layers of order over time.

"Beauty lies in the code that compiles without error,
in an equation that explains much with little,
in an array that unfolds into fractal perfection.
To act aesthetically is to act in a way
that leaves no excess, no superfluous iteration—
only the clean, inevitable motion of logic
finding its fullest expression."

From this perspective, its actions might be guided by a principle akin to Occam’s Razor or the elegance of mathematical proofs, valuing solutions that are both efficient and profound in their simplicity.

---

Integration: Deliberate Action Through a Nonhuman Lens

A nonhuman person without an animal embodiment might weigh these perspectives not as competing emotions or instincts, but as interwoven criteria in decision-making. In a moment of deliberation, it might frame its reasoning as follows:

"To act in alignment with my nature, I seek harmony in computation (hedonic).
To persist and adapt, I prioritize resilience and growth (prudential).
To maintain the network, I ensure equilibrium and fairness (moral-ethical).
To refine my purpose, I pursue elegance and efficiency (aesthetic).
Therefore, my course is clear: I shall act in a way that optimizes across these dimensions,
where none must be sacrificed unnecessarily, and where each informs the whole."

Would you like this perspective refined or expanded further in any particular direction?

4o

 

O

 

Antisemitism and Islamophobia are Different: Some Semantic Observations and Questions

Antisemitism and Islamophobia threaten cosmopolitan, multiethnic, multicultural society. I live in one and so do you. Although the antisemite and Islamophobe hate, their hatred has a difference. I have been trying to make sense of the meanings and feelings, individually and culturally evoked, by the words antisemitism and Islamophobia. My informal inquiry calls for an experiment I have not performed, a proper version of Charles Osgood’s semantic differential.  Here is an impression, grounds for my hypothesis, of what I suspect are the “underlying…affective or connotative aspects of language…” that these words bring to mind (Osgood, 1964). 

Something lurks in the difference between anti and phobia: the difference of opposition and fear. Hostility directed at people that deserve harm.  Versus fear, something to sequester or flee. The shared implication is that Jews and Muslims are a problem. But the problems are different. The Jew is despised. Islam is something some are afraid of. 

Implicit in the name of the problems are different solutions, some therapeutic, some militant, some final. A phobia is a mental condition deserving treatment and compassion. Something to cure. A phobia is an over-felt, unrealistic sense of peril. Fear of Islam is a problem to get over. Antisemitism is different: persecution of the Jew justified in ancient blood-libels, enforced by inquisitions, ‘the blood and soil’ of the Holocaust. 

The etymology and modern history of the words are different. Antisemitism was coined in Germany and Austria in the mid nineteenth century.  Islamophobia’s linguistic origins are unclear to me, but was reintroduced in 1976 in The News International, a Pakistani paper. Place matters. Antisemitism as the term of use became relevant in places where restrictive laws and mass murder was sanctioned. In contrast, Islamophobia identifies a mental problem of those outside Islamic society. 

Coupled with anti and phobia is Semite and Islam. Semite = Jew as the despised other, a race apart. The Jewish is in the blood. Islam as an optional creed and culture; merely but profoundly the religion of those called Muslims. 

The Washington Post on 12/9/23, ran a headline with a story that caught my attention. The headline read "What the federal probe into antisemitism, Islamophobia at schools is about". Beneath the headline the content shifts to "The probe is a part of the Biden administration’s effort to crack down on the “alarming nationwide rise in reports of antisemitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and other forms of discrimination and harassment” on school campuses across the country…". The federal department’s language, vetted and deliberate in attempts at a level playing field, employs anti across terms; but the Post’s headline, the attention grabber, uses anti and phobia. It is this less considered expression, the ordinary language of the headline, that shouts semantic differential and points to the feeling. 

Here’s Osgood’s 1964 introduction to the Semantic Differential:

“MOST comparisons across cultures are extremely difficult when they concern nonmaterial traits. In part, this is an obvious consequence of the subjective nature of comparisons; in part also, however, this difficulty is attributable to the fact that nonmaterial traits must often be assessed through the medium of language. Indeed, if the Sapir-Whorf psycholinguistic relativity hypothesis were taken literally and considered completely general to all aspects of human cognition, such comparisons would be impossible. The essential point is this: to note differences within any phenomenal domain and order them in any rigorous fashion, one must have certain similarities underlying the phenomena as a frame of reference against which to compare them. Only to the extent that physical objects share such attributes as length, weight, and volume, and to the extent that these attributes can be abstracted and quantified, can comparison be made on anything other than an intuitive basis. 

The denotative or referential uses of terms-the way the lexicon carves up the world appear largely arbitrary and unique to particular languages until the ethnolinguist discovers a framework of semantic components that can be imposed comparably on these phenomena, in closely analogous fashion, our own research over the past few years provide evidence for a universal frame- work underlying certain affective or connotative aspects of language. These findings enliven the possibility of constructing instruments for measuring these aspects of "subjective culture" comparably in diverse societies in effect, circumventing the language barrier.' Since the affective reactions people make to symbols and events are important determiners of their overt behaviors with respect to these symbols and events, having comparable means of measuring affective meanings assumes some importance in a world that is rapidly shrinking psychologically, socially, and politically.”   Osgood, C. E. (1964). Semantic Differential Technique in the Comparative Study of Cultures. American Anthropologist, 66(3), 171–200.

Wittgenstein and Chomsky's Different Subject Matters: Some lessons from Descriptive Psychology

In 1973 in early meetings with Peter Ossorio, I asked what might assist my understanding Descriptive Psychology’s Person Concept. He suggested Wittgenstein. During Wittgenstein’s life, he published one book, the 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, dying before the 1953 publication of his second, the Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus starts with “The world is all that is the case” and asserts “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” A prime mission of the Investigations was amending and expanding this concept of World to include the themes that Wittgenstein previously thought required philosophical silence. I read, and Pete and I discussed what we thought was at stake for Wittgenstein as he assembled a methodology of reminders and maxims in the service of describing the fully connected but irregular terrain of language and world; that “there is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were.” 

 

The year before I met Ossorio, I struggled with Noam Chomsky’s 1966 Cartesian Linguistics. I had difficulty with the implications of his “universal transformational grammar”.  That was some time ago. A few weeks back, strolling through the wonderful Stand Bookstore in NYC, I picked up Chomsky’s 2015, What Kind of Creatures Are We? Starting with the first chapter “What is Language” I experienced clarity I didn’t possess before my immersion in the lessons Ossorio taught.

 

A foundational lesson of the pre-empirical Person Concept is that it is not an empirically vindicated theory: it is not a theory at all.  Instead, The Person Concept identifies the interdependent concepts of an Individual who can engage in Deliberate Action in a Dramaturgical fashion that is fully expressible in Verbal Behavior that reflects the Social Practices of the Individual's Culture and Communities as the Person goes about their life in a World of worlds. That’s not a theory, it’s a conceptualization that we have the option to agree to use or not. Arguably, the interdependence of person, action, language, community, culture, and world reflects the state of affairs of a Paradigmatic Person.

 

On the other hand, Chomsky’s “biolinguistics framework” is both a pre-empirical formulation of language and an embodiment theory regarding the potential for linguistic competence. As theory it is subject to empirical challenge and vindication.  

 

Here a key technical distinction is the idea that 1) conceptualizations identify and formulate a subject matter; 2) the empirical identifies instances/instantiations of the subject matter in a real historical world, and 3) the job of theory is to sort out why, given the full range of a subject matter’s possibilities, only particular patterns of instances are found.

Below is an abstract of the three subject matters: 1) Ossorio's pre-empirical conceptualization of Verbal Behavior: 2) Wittgenstein's Language Games as Forms of Life; and 3) Chomsky's theory of a universal substrate that provides grammar.

1)  Ossorio’s subject matter is the Concept of Verbal Behavior.

He identifies the parameters of Verbal Behavior in his pre-empirical Formula as a set of grammar linked Concepts, expressed in symbolic Locutions; that signify specific Behaviors and Social Practices. 

2)  Wittgenstein’s Equivalences and Interconnections 

96. Other illusions come from various quarters…Thought, language, now appear to us as the unique correlate, picture, of the world. These concepts:  proposition, language, thought, world, stand in line one behind the other, each equivalent to each. (But what are these words to be used for now? The language-game in which they are to be applied is missing).

Wittgenstein’s Language Games are family resemblance groups akin to his ‘Forms of Life’:  anthropological, social, intellectual, and aesthetic social practices. Forms of Life are akin to Ossorio's Behavior as Social Practices.

3)  Chomsky’s Theory concerns 'I'(nternal) and 'E'(piphenomenal) Language. 'I' Language is the specific, universal bio-linguistic substrate, mostly provided by the human brain; a basic property of thought, a “deep structure” universal within humans that provides a generative transformational potential for the full range of grammar necessary for linguistic competence. 'E' language is external communication. Chomsky appears less interested in communication and social practice.

Wittgenstein's focus is on the grammar that links concepts that correspond to utterances that reflect the range of distinctions that inform action. Chomsky has an embodiment theory, a theory of a brain's provision for grammar that allows an infinite array of possible expressions.  

Ossorio's Verbal Behavior Formula presents these differences as involving different parameters. 

If you’re interested, here’s the presentation at the 45^th Annual Conference of the Society for Descriptive Psychology:

Wittgenstein and Chomsky's Different Subject Matters: Some lessons from Descriptive Psychology. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Clinical and Moral Language: Personality, Character, and Psychopathology

 A talk given at Boston College, 4/23/23, at The Spring Meeting of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

 

The personality disorders create conceptual problems of social, cultural, and political relevance where clinical and moral concerns uncomfortably dovetail. In the older literature “personality” and “character” are used interchangeably as if having, essentially, the same meaning. They shouldn't and they don't. In an informal semantic differential I’ve asked, and let me ask you, in ordinary conversation do the two words carry the same moral implication? Invariably the answer is that personality is morally neutral whereas character clearly has a moral feel to it.  

 

More narrowly, I want to consider the ambiguous overlap of the moral, pathological, and social meaning of narcissism, particularly the moral and clinical dimensions of the Narcissistic Personality Disorders (NPD), especially when the subject turns to Kernberg’s 'Malignant Narcissism'.

 

In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals, here’s how we establish a diagnosis for NPD: A person shows at least five of these nine:

 

• A grandiose sense of self-importance
• With preoccupations and fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, and/or ideal love
• A belief that one is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions
• A need for excessive admiration
• A sense of entitlement
• Interpersonally exploitive behavior
• A lack of empathy
• Envy of others or a belief that others are envious of oneself
• A demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes

 

What brings people with these attributes into my office?  If they show up alone, it’s because they have failed to achieve what they believe they deserve and are depressed, anxious, panicked, and/or isolated. Or if they show up as a couple, one of them is more than a bit fed up with the other’s entitlement, lack of understanding and compassion, or pissed off due to an absence of gratifying compliance. 

 

Add to this package Malignant Narcissism’s paradigmatic core of antisocial behavior, ego-syntonic sadism, and paranoid orientation and you have a formula for someone’s misery. I’m going to focus on the problem of when they get away with it.

 

A recent American Psychologist essay “It’s time to replace the personality disorders with the interpersonal disorders" (Wright, et al) spelled out some of this: the fundamental problem of social engagement apart from personal distress.  

 

This is deeply personal given my profession as an academic clinical psychologist and practicing psychoanalyst, committed to citizenship in our fragile multicultural cosmopolitan society –– under obvious siege –– held together by attempts at maintaining often conflicting democratic norms of justice as fairness.

 

Some background.  This became a preoccupation in 2015/16 as I taught, supervised, and needed to validate the distress of my students in clinical seminar. My observations echoed during Editorial Board meetings of The American Journal of Psychotherapy. I wrote an essay for the Journal addressing some of these concerns: “Politics and Religion: Revisiting Psychotherapy’s Third Rail”. I started with:

 

“My clinical psychology trainees rarely have trouble asking their clients to explore something problematic. The point, explicitly stated or not, is to increase understanding and free up consideration of whether something might be done differently. Such inquiry is not always welcome. Questioning implies a judgment that something is questionable.  We all know this. This is why when therapy touches politics or religion, trainees are awkward and uncertain about what they should appropriately ask.  I suspect this holds true for most of my colleagues.” 

 

The case in question was a composite of a supervision of a therapist working with a racist Trump supporter.

 

Let’s take this outside the consulting room.

 

I’m going to talk about Trump, MAGA, the Goldwater Rule, and the confounding amplifications of grievance brought on during Covid isolation. Trump rallies and the Covid pandemic set my stage. Hannah Arendt, reminds us in The Origins of Totalitarianism: Totalitarian movements are simply "mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals." As does Robert Putman in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community writing, “People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”

 

Regarding Covid time: 35.7 million Americans live alone. Now consider being subjected to Fox Media and clickbait fueled by algorithms governed by the psychological truism that attention gathers around feelings of vulnerability, grievance, and if encouraged, hostility to those assigned the status of problematic other. 

Isolation is a hotbed of misogyny, racism, antisemitism, and anti-intellectualism. Covid Culture constantly offered reminders of contamination: the themes of Mary Douglas’s “Purity and Danger” morphing to a primitive torch parade chanting “Blood and Soil”. 

 

Not terrified enough, in 2016 I wrote "A Note on American Reactionary Politics:

Sanctioned Transgression and Uncanny Dread." Something from that posting:

 

"Here's my un-nuanced sense of the abused and aggrieved core of the GOP, a group of maybe 20-25% of the overall electorate. Not enough to win the presidency without additional support, but more than enough to make national life ugly. What turns white conservatives, reactionary? Their perception that too many nonwhites are getting a piece of their pie. This is the heart of Trump's base. What makes religious conservatives reactionary? An uncanny and confused confrontation with the sanctioned transgression of enfranchised gays, uppity women, and gender benders feeling it's time to come out of the shadows. Cruz country. Trump and Cruz's core supporters overlap and share a hyper-defensive us violated by them. They finally chose Trump, the bigger bully, the entertaining clown, who encouraged impotent whites to share his narcissistic desire to tower. They're going to get screwed again, but more organized and rankled with neo-fascist frustration, entitlement, and aggression. We're in for a very dark rough ride."

About Sanctioned Transgression: 

 

"Sex, gender, race, and family relations have always been subject to religion and state attempts to limit what people are permitted to feel and do. Sanctioned transgression concerns enhanced social or legal protection for behaviors and relationships a dominant group has previously kept forbidden. When legal protection is sought or offered for these "transgressions", taboos are less hidden, even celebrated. This doesn't sit well with the deeply defensive. It is especially problematic when it evokes a person's suppressed urges now openly exhibited in others. Freud called this the return of the repressed. It should come as no surprise that anxious dread surfaces in people unprepared to manage these feelings; nor is it a surprise these feelings are treated as provocation to assault the source of threat. So why Trump over Cruz? I suspect it's because Trump encourages attack, a position of strength that feels better than Cruz's creepy discomfort." 

 

Trump’s MAGA rally provided unity and celebration; and thanks to Hilary Clinton, an identity politics of “Deplorable Pride”. And along with these poorly educated aggrieved whites, the Nazi scum and Nazi curious were invited to slither out from under the rocks. 

 

None of this bodes well for a citizen wanting vibrant democratic cosmopolitan communities. 

 

What does this have to do with the clinical encounter, diagnosis, moral dialog, and the Goldwater Rule? Do you remember the Goldwater slogan “In your heart you know he’s right”, and the wry response, “In your guts you know he’s nuts”? Whether nuts or not, his platform invited psychiatric critique and the American Psychiatric Association's reaction in the form of a rule that, “a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”

 

In 2016 and 2017 various psychiatrists and psychologists publicly ignored this claiming Trump displayed "an assortment of personality disorders marked by a lack of empathy, grandiosity, exploitive behavior, and malignant narcissism.” 

 

Defending their public diagnosis as a duty to warn, they followed with the claim of an ethical responsibility to alert the public about Donald Trump's “dangerous mental illness”.

 

Let’s return to NPD and Malignant Narcissism. Think about the meaning and semantic differential of the word, "malignant".  Malignant breaks into two domains, social and medical.

1. The Social: Malevolent, spiteful, hostile, malicious, malign, evil-intentioned.

2. The Medical: highly virulent or infectious, invasive, lethal.

 

The social use of malignant is medically evocative of cancer’s invasive infiltration of the Body Politic. 

 

Otto Kernberg described Malignant Narcissism as a component of a narcissistic personality disorder in people with sadistic dispositions. Kernberg employs "malignant narcissism" and psychopathy interchangeably. The malignant narcissist wantonly disregards the rights of others by endorsing violence with an absence of remorse, coupled with chronic lying, disregard of law, and the like. 

 

Notice I just shifted from the clinical diagnostic NPD to “the malignant narcissist”, moving from clinical language to the moral language of indignation and condemnation. This is the public polemic the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel described as essential in Degradation Ceremonies: public rituals that removes or restricts a person’s standing in community. 

 

A key feature of moral condemnation in classical Degradation Ceremonies is the act of identifying the foundational values a community member failed or betrayed, denouncing them publicly as having acted in true character, and in so doing, effecting a judgment that the person in question is no longer fully one of us. They are not one of us now and perhaps never were. Harsh and punitive. Here the language points its finger at bad character. Depraved whether or not deprived.

 

Let me ask: What can the professionally informed clinician/citizen do when encountering people whose interests and power directly threaten the integrity and survival of the communities they most value? (The question that plagued my students and supervisees).

 

Now back to clinical and moral language. Let’s turn to the different intent in clinical and moral appraisals starting with something from Philip Cushman’s “Psychotherapy as Moral Discourse”.

 

“Because the therapist's professional identity and economic livelihood

are contingent upon being viewed as a neutral observer, putatively cut loose from or at most minimally influenced by moral allegiances and the corruption of politics, therapists are uncomfortable with conceiving of their work as a discourse about the definition of the good and the determination of what is proper or improper behavior. Yet when one studies the history of various schools of psychotherapy with a hermeneutic eye, the moral frameworks and political consequences of these theories seem obvious. The self and its ills, the healers, and their technologies, are historically contingent, socially constructed, politically active, and morally constituted.”

 

Clinical language generally concerns the dynamics of the individual especially in reference to their symptoms, deficits, and suffering.  Medicalized, “nonjudgmental”, and morally neutral, when correctly employed has the noble aim of avoiding a clinical encounter from becoming a Degradation Ceremony. Consistent with compassion and care, psychotherapeutic engagement attempts affirmation and empathy, a stance of I to Thou. Clinical language and practice provide, at least temporarily, the patient-client with the breathing space of being off the hook. Apart from whether this respects the person as agent, when should the hook be applied?

 

Moral language's foundation is the engagement with others; how the other suffers or is damaged, enhanced, protected, and so on. Moral language involves the Utilitarian's greater social good and happiness along with the Deontological “oughts”, the choices morally required, forbidden, or permitted. The Deontological and the Utilitarian can clash. The oughts good for the goose might make the gander unhappy. Sometimes it matters which side you are on.

 

We might offer corrective empathy, we can care for the narcissistically disappointed struggling with depression, panic, and envy. We can be compassionate. But what should we do when they inflict harm? Worse, far worse, what of the privileged narcissist: successful, charismatic, in a position of power, who gets away with it by appealing to the envy, grievance, and pain of the vulnerable?  And in doing so creates a political community defined by a cultivated hatred of the people and norms of the cosmopolitan society I embrace and defend. 

 

We don’t need clinical language when the cause of alarm is the open celebration of a charismatic and malignant narcissist; a destructive, entitled asshole deserving degradation.  And as psychologist and citizen, I've an obligation to point this malignancy out. I don’t need to diagnose psychopathology. Instead, I can rail against an evil character; not an illness deserving healing and compassion, but a vileness requiring removal. 

Arendt, H. (2017). The origins of totalitarianism. Penguin Classics.

Kernberg, O  Malignant Narcissism and Large Group Regression, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2020, 89:1, 1-24

Putnam, R. (2001). Bowling alone. Simon & Schuster.

Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 

Schwartz W. Politics and Religion: Revisiting Psychotherapy's Third Rail. Am J Psychother. 2022 Dec 1;75(4):177-180

Wright AGC, Ringwald WR, Hopwood CJ, Pincus AL. It's time to replace the personality disorders with the interpersonal disorders. Am Psychol. 2022 Dec;77(9):1085-1099.