H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: PUNZO

 G.: Punzo, then. I came upon his Psicologia della personalità of 1952 and found myself wondering whether Italians cannot leave persona in peace. S.: You thought personalità an inflation. G.: A suspicious inflation. Person is abstract enough. Once one gets to personality one is in danger of importing traits, style, temperament, charm, and perhaps a moustache. S.: Whereas your paper is Personal Identity, not Personality. G.: Exactly. Identity of a person, not the identity of his table manners. S.: So your title means the identity-relation as applying to persons. G.: Yes. Not a new species called personal identity as opposed to, say, bovine identity. Merely identity, under that sortal. S.: A point often missed by those who like compound nouns because they save them the trouble of thought. G.: Quite. One says personal identity and they hear a psychological mist. S.: While you meant to ask under what conditions a person at one time is the same person at another. G.: Precisely. The old same man, same person business, with all the Lockean nuisances attached. S.: Then Punzo’s personalità would belong elsewhere. G.: Entirely elsewhere, unless he is being uncommonly careful. Personality is what one has in the way of character, tone, disposition, perhaps cultivated charm. Person is what one is, if one is one. S.: Reid helps here. G.: Reid always helps by producing a Scotch nuisance of exactly the right size. S.: His brave officer. G.: Yes. Reid’s favourite military metaphysician. The boy flogged at school, the officer who took the standard, the general in old age. S.: The standard objection to Locke being that memory seems non-transitive across the chain. G.: Quite. The general remembers taking the standard, the officer remembers being flogged, the general does not remember being flogged. Therefore, if personhood just is tied to direct memory, identity appears to fall to pieces. S.: And then one says Locke has refuted himself by a soldier. G.: One says it with great satisfaction and insufficient patience. S.: Because Locke already has resources. G.: He does. The common anti-Lockean performance treats him as if he had never distinguished between being the same substance, the same man, and the same person in the forensic sense. S.: Or as if consciousness had to be understood in the crude diary form: I now explicitly remember that episode, therefore I am that person. G.: Exactly. Locke’s point is subtler. Person is a forensic notion, tied to imputation, accountability, appropriation of actions and thoughts. S.: So Reid’s officer may embarrass a crude memory criterion without quite destroying Locke’s way of carving things. G.: Yes. One can reply that overlapping continuity of consciousness, or appropriation in the right way, saves the case better than Reid allows. S.: Then the officer’s person is one thing, his personality another. G.: Quite. The officer’s person is what is at issue in whether he is the same accountable subject over time. The officer’s personality is whether he is dashing, melancholic, vain, or intolerably martial at dinner. S.: Reid’s counterexample concerns the first. G.: Entirely. It does not concern whether the old general retains the officer’s briskness. S.: Yet the vocabulary invites confusion because person and personality sit too close. G.: And philosophers are often ruined by neighbours. S.: Then Punzo’s title from 1952 makes you wonder whether personalità in Italian risks importing the wrong neighbour into discussion of persona. G.: Exactly. One fears that what ought to remain a question about persona becomes one about a profile. S.: But Italian personalità does not always mean mere charm or set of traits. G.: No, and that is where one must be fair. It can bear a more serious sense. Still, I reserve the right to distrust it on sight. S.: Especially after reading your own Personal Identity. G.: Naturally. One grows proprietary over one’s ambiguities. S.: And then Strawson arrives with Person. G.: Ah yes. Strawson and his grand noun. In Individuals he makes much of the concept of a person as primitive in our descriptive metaphysics. S.: A basic particular of a special sort. G.: Yes. Neither merely body nor merely consciousness, but the sort of being to which both mental and physical predicates are ascribed. S.: Which is not at all the same as personality. G.: Quite. Strawson is emphatically on the side of person, not personality. He wants the conceptual place of persons in our scheme, not an Edwardian sketch of temperament. S.: So one could say that Strawson’s person stands to Punzo’s personalità rather as your personal identity stands to personality. G.: Very nearly. Though Strawson would be more solemn about it, and I rather less. S.: The solemnity is part of descriptive metaphysics. G.: Yes. One must look grave while saying what one cannot avoid saying anyway. S.: Still, the distinction matters. Person names a bearer of predicates. Personality names a manner of bearing them. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: Thank you. Then perhaps Reid too can be reformulated in your preferred fashion. Reid’s person is the subject whose identity is in question. Reid’s personality is whatever features make the officer seem boyishly bold or the general pompously retrospective. G.: Exactly. And the counterexample has no force at all if one slides from person to personality. We do not ask whether the general has the same personality as the boy. We ask whether he is the same person. S.: Locke, then, is being answered with the wrong noun if one shifts into personality. G.: Precisely. One ends by refuting a music-hall version of Locke. S.: And perhaps Punzo’s title gives you the faint worry that psychology may be more at home with traits than with persons. G.: A very faint worry, yes. Psychology of personality sounds apt enough for traits, dispositions, style of response. But if one tries to take personalità as somehow philosophically prior to persona, I begin reaching for the claret. S.: Before or after the OED. G.: Usually before. The OED is a restorative, not a first line of defence. S.: Yet you wanted to check it. G.: Oh, one checks the OED the way one checks a witness one does not intend to trust fully. S.: Formerly the NED. G.: Yes, when dictionaries still had the decency to sound infrastructural. S.: So before the lexicographical excursion, let us keep to philosophy. In Individuals, Strawson says much about person because person marks a basic node in our conceptual scheme. It is not an optional cultural embroidery. G.: Exactly. It is not a flourish. It is built into the way we identify, reidentify, and ascribe. S.: While personalità, if it enters, enters later. G.: Much later. As a derivative abstraction from observed style, character, habit, psychological profile. S.: Then your irritation is not merely philological. G.: No. It is conceptual. Multiply persona into personalità too soon and one risks moving from the bearer to the furnishings. S.: The house before the wallpaper. G.: Precisely. S.: Reid’s officer again helps. The officer’s person is what persists if the case is to work. The officer’s personality may alter without metaphysical alarm. G.: Yes. Officers are allowed to grow dull. S.: Or prudent. G.: Prudence is only dullness with a pension. S.: Then Locke’s resources against Reid lie in refusing the over-simple memory formula and preserving the forensic notion of person. G.: Very much so. Locke is not merely saying: same remembered episode, same person. He is trying to map the conditions under which consciousness extends responsibility and appropriation. S.: And consciousness need not be interpreted atomistically. G.: Exactly. Reid’s parade-ground objection is effective only against a simplification. S.: So if Punzo writes Psicologia della personalità in 1952, one may grant him the psychological domain while still saying that the metaphysical and forensic weight lies with persona. G.: Yes. That is the charitable division of labour. S.: Now to the etymological mischief. G.: Ah yes. Person, says someone, from Etruscan, not Greek prosopon, and certainly not from pro plus sonare, as the old schoolroom myth liked to have it. S.: Strawson’s period encouraged such demythologising. G.: As did the better philologists. The old pro-sona story is too theatrical even for me. S.: Yet theatricality helped it survive. G.: Naturally. A bad etymology with costumes will beat a good one in plain clothes nine times out of ten. S.: Still, if person is not Greek prosopon and not pro-sona, but has some Etruscan ancestry in the neighbourhood of persona, that rather strengthens your reluctance to multiply it into personalità. G.: Perhaps. At least it removes one bogus dramatic pedigree before we add a psychological annex. S.: So the line would be: Strawson makes much of person, not personalità; descriptive metaphysics begins with person because our scheme requires it; and any slide into personality belongs to a later, derivative register. G.: Very good. S.: Then why not simply say that personalità is harmless as long as one knows it is derivative. G.: Because harmless derivatives have a way of founding departments. S.: A fair institutional anxiety. G.: The only kind worth having. S.: Let us turn to the OED, then. G.: If we must. S.: You wanted the first use of personality. G.: Yes, or at least the dictionary’s preferred first use, which is never quite the same thing. S.: Because dictionaries are historical only after a fashion. G.: Exactly. They are museums run by very literate opportunists. S.: Still, they can tell one roughly when personality enters English in a recognisable abstract sense. G.: They can. And one may then discover whether the word first appears as a theological, legal, dramatic, or psychological growth from person. S.: The old senses often include what belongs to the status of a person rather than characterological distinctiveness. G.: Exactly. Which is important. Personality once had a more legal-metaphysical life before becoming a parlour word for charm. S.: So perhaps the dictionary would actually support your distinction. G.: Perhaps. Though I do not give a hoot what the dictionary says. S.: I thought not. G.: I consult it the way one consults a map of a town one already suspects was rebuilt badly. S.: Yet even so, the map may show that personality did not begin as mere temperament. G.: True enough. It may show a development from the condition or fact of being a person, or from personhood in some doctrinal sense, before the later psychological narrowing or expansion. S.: Which would make Punzo’s title less frivolous than your first irritation suggested. G.: Less frivolous, yes. Not necessarily less inflationary. S.: Because even a historically respectable derivative may still be conceptually awkward in philosophy. G.: Precisely. Historical innocence does not guarantee present usefulness. S.: And Cicero? G.: Cicero would object on several fronts at once. S.: Not only to pro-sona. G.: No. He would find the schoolboy derivation laughable, the Etruscan correction learned but possibly beside his own living usage, and personalitas probably barbarous in more than one way. S.: So if one announced to Cicero that persona is Etruscan, not Greek prosopon, and that later thinkers have added personalitas and then personalità, he would raise an eyebrow. G.: Two eyebrows, if available. One for the etymology, one for the suffix. S.: Yet he used persona in rich ways. G.: Very rich ways. Mask, role, legal standing, rhetorical position, moral posture. Enough to keep half the humanities employed. S.: Which again suggests that multiplying into personalità may be either a useful development or a deplorable overgrowth. G.: Exactly. The question is whether one needs the multiplication or merely enjoys it. S.: Punzo in 1952 may have needed it for psychology. G.: Perhaps. Psychology does have a weakness for suffixes. S.: Whereas you and Strawson prefer the unmultiplied noun. G.: Very much so. Person will do an astonishing amount of work if one lets it. S.: Then the philosophical moral is clear enough. Personal identity concerns the identity of a person. It is not a hybrid realm called personal identity as opposed to identity simpliciter. Personality concerns the relatively contingent organisation of traits, style, and psychological profile. Reid’s objection is about the first, not the second. Locke can answer better than Reid allows because person in Locke is already a forensic notion richer than the caricature. Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics places person among the indispensable concepts of our scheme, not personalità. G.: Splendidly compressed. S.: And the philological afterword is less clear. G.: Quite rightly. Philology ought occasionally to remain less clear than metaphysics, if only to discourage vanity. S.: Still, one can say that the old pro-sona tale is too neat, the Etruscan line is at least a learned corrective, and the OED is useful only as a record of English lexical manners, not as an oracle. G.: Exactly. The OED tells us what English writers did, not what Cicero ought to have meant. S.: Nor what you ought to tolerate. G.: Heaven forbid. S.: Then is it good to multiply persona into personalità? G.: Sometimes yes, in psychology and perhaps in social description. In first philosophy, generally no, unless one enjoys repairing confusions one has just manufactured. S.: So your punchline is conservative. G.: Merely economical. S.: Persona first, personalità if needed. G.: Exactly. Do not build the annexe before the house. S.: And if the dictionary protests? G.: Let it. Dictionaries are excellent for recording annexes. S.: While Cicero remains in the main building. G.: Complaining about the plasterwork. S.: And Strawson in another room, insisting that person is conceptually basic. G.: Yes, and forgetting to cite me. S.: While Punzo decorates the corridor with personalità. G.: In 1952, no less. S.: Then perhaps the final settlement is this. We may allow Punzo his corridor, Reid his officer, Locke his forensic person, Strawson his basic particular, the OED its dates, and Cicero his contempt. G.: Provided no one asks the officer’s personality to do the officer’s person’s work. S.: Or the dictionary’s work to do Cicero’s. G.: Exactly. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Oxonian, with an Etruscan aftertaste. S.: And the suffix? G.: Best kept on a short leash. S.: Like most psychological abstractions. G.: Especially the personable ones. S.: Then personality is what happens when person acquires admirers. G.: Or a publisher. S.: I shall note both. G.: Do, but do not call it personalitas in front of Cicero. S.: He would object? G.: He would object so hard that even the OED would forget its first citation.