Ossorio: "What led you to start developing the Person Concept?" In a sense the answer is very simple, namely, total dissatisfaction with the state of the art in psychology. Total dissatisfaction with the nature of the explanations... Total dissatisfaction with the research methodology and the rationales for it.

And when I say "total dissatisfaction", I mean I sat there and laughed. [laughter] I simply couldn’t take it seriously. And I said "There’s got to be a better way." Out of the dissatisfaction came...

And as you can see, in terms of being a competent player of the game, which we all are, one of the major things is you need the motivation to go do something like this. If you have it, lots of people could have done it. Without that motivation, you just go along and do things the way they’ve been done. So I would count that motivation as the major thing about how come I got into the business.

Audience: Pete, I don’t know how/if others can tolerate this, but you had mentioned to me that you hold a little bit on Frege and some of your thoughts about Wittgenstein’s early work. Were those pieces that you had laying on your desk, so to speak, that kind of inched you toward making something like the Person Concept?

Ossorio: No. They were influential at certain points in why I did it the way I did it, but they weren’t what got me started. I was started before I ever read Wittgenstein. Not before I read Frege, but before I read Wittgenstein.

However, Frege was more directly responsible for a piece than Wittgenstein was. The piece that he was responsible for is the Reality Concept. The Transition Rules in the Reality Concept were explicitly, consciously patterned after Frege’s Axioms of Set Theory. Remember those axioms that start with "a = a", "a + b = b + a"? What I thought was, "We need something that simple and fundamental having to do with the real world in order to have the piece we need." So those Transition Rules I hope have that same kind of simple quality, but fundamental. And that was very conscious.

Audience: And could you tell us...

Ossorio: By the way, I did it in about an hour.

Audience: I was just going to ask, could you place it a little bit? Where were you sitting at the time you did it? [laughter] I’m just curious. Did you have Scotch on the desk?

Ossorio: No.

Audience: Before you leave this one, since you brought up the massive dissatisfaction, do you have any explanation for why this massive dissatisfaction has not occurred to more people? This specifically bothers me because I’ve been reading a lot of the science and religion literature, and why the same sorts of dissatisfaction have not cropped up among these people who are concerned with the place where they need it...

Ossorio: Yeah. In a word, I think there is that kind of dissatisfaction, but it takes a different form. And it takes the form of being victimized. I was never a victim. Lots of people feel the burden of that. Lots of people are hurting from it, and they know it. But what they don’t have is that fighting spirit that says "Go kill the bastards." [laughter]

Now it isn’t just a matter of fighting spirits. I had a lot of background in a lot of things. I spent seventeen years in college. And a lot of it was just auditing classes of various sorts -- lots of philosophy, some linguistics, some math, lots of psychology. And some of it, a fair amount of it, I learned from experts, so that I wasn’t about to be browbeaten by second hand guys in psychology who were simply retailing what the real guys -- the philosophers, the mathematicians, the linguists -- were saying as original work.

Because of that, I wasn’t stopped by the usual borders where most people would say, "Well, I don’t know anything about that. That’s linguistics." "I don’t know anything about that. That’s mathematics." "That’s philosophy." I said "To hell with it. Here it is."

Audience: Are there other people doing the Person Concept outside of psychology but more just in philosophy?

Ossorio: More what?

Audience: Are there other individuals articulating the Person Concept in a similar or roughly equivalent way not in psychology but in philosophy?

Ossorio: Yeah. But that’s in philosophy, and what you wind up with is some philosophy.

Audience: And that never makes it over into psychology?

Ossorio: Yeah. It never makes it over into linguistics. It never makes it into reality. Now one form of that broad background is that it gave me the confidence to use my common sense. Common sense is what covers all of that ground.

Audience: [showing Pete something]

Ossorio: [laughing] The return of the repressed.

Audience: My first year in grad school you gave me that. That was the first thing I got. That was clear. Everything else was fuzzy in my mind.

Ossorio: Well, as you can see, there’s a lot of historical accident. It’s not just a matter of methodology.