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If we’re going to get ontologically scrupulous in restricting the scope of the Person entity to “real human beings,” it is only fair to survey the range of metaphysical/epistemological options for implementation. These include but are not limited to the following:
1. Meinongian: The real subsumes but exceeds the actual. So sure, let in Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene! They are non-actual realities.
2. Lockean: Persons extend only so far as continuity of memory. If author A gets bopped over the head and becomes a total amnesiac, then create a new entity instance B for everything created by the subsequent person occupying that body.
3. Russellian (circa 1912): Create instances of Person entities only for those human beings with which one has direct epistemic acquaintance. So, basically, oneself only. (One might also call this the Cartesian option.)
4. Hegelian: Employ only one Person entity: The_World_Spirit.
5. Spinozan: Only substances are self-existent and therefore properly “real.” Therefore use one entity only, to be called either “Deus” or “Natura” (pending Working Group recommendation).
6. Dennettian: Create a entity for anything you can usefully take the “Person Stance” toward. (N.B. this might include certain chess-playing computers.)
7. Turingian: Query the candidate via the “Imitation Game.” If you can’t distinguish it from the other player, a refusal to create a Person entity for it is “too meaningless to deserve discussion.”
8. Aristotelian: Exclude women and slaves, thank you.
9. Kantian: Proceed in accordance with intuition, but treat “real” as shorthand for “empirically real but transcendentally ideal.”
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