Emergent persons

Recent psychological theorizing about the emergence of persons makes a number of ontological claims that are not always explicit. A critical consideration of such claims reveals both considerable convergence and some points of disagreement across different psychological theories of emergent personhood. What is clear is that all such theories resist the reduction of persons to biophysical or sociocultural properties, conditions, and processes. In various ways, they each call for a nonreductionistic recognition of the sociocultural constitution of important aspects of personhood, without denying the necessity of biophysical requirements of personhood. Because standard emergentist positions in physical science and the philosophy of physical science mostly ignore the sociocultural level of reality, psychological theorizing about the emergence of persons requires an alternative ontological framework. It is proposed that an ontology of levels of reality that includes the physical, chemical, biological, sociocultural, and personal/psychological is appropriate for understanding how persons are both substantively and relationally emergent within the biophysical, sociocultural world. With such an ontological framework in place, it is possible to understand human activity in the world as the primary vehicle for both the phylogenetic evolution and ontogenetic development of persons.