ABSTRACT
As a science, psychology has often been constructed around one of two concepts: the mind or the brain. For those working on the basis of the former, the mind is typically seen as a kind of mental space, housing so-called mental representations. For those inclined to a neuroscientific approach, the brain is seen as the seat of psychological functioning. In this chapter, I argue that both are in many cases misguided versions of Cartesianism, i.e., the view of the mind associated with the philosophy of René Descartes, which identifies mental phenomena with inner entities in the mind, brain, or mind/brain. Instead, I claim that psychology should be based on the concept of the person. The person is a moral and legal concept that refers to a living agent, who can be held accountable for his or her actions. A person moves in a moral space of reasons in addition to a physical space of causation. A psychological science thus needs to take normativity into account and describe the properties of its subject matter using what Rom Harré has called “person grammar,” i.e., a vocabulary suitable for describing persons and their actions.
