Paradigms and personhood: A deepening of the dilemmas in ethics and medical ethics

There are many calls for a definitions personhood, but also many logical an d Wittgensteinian reasons to think fulfilling this is unimportant or imposs ible. I argue that we can consider many contexts as language-games and cons ider the person as the key player in each. We can then examine the attribut es, presuppositions and implications of personhood in those contexts. I use law and therapeutic psychology as two examples of such contexts or languag e-games. Each correlates with one of the classic "theories'' of ethics-deon tology and consequentialism. But each is a large enough cluster to consider them as paradigms in a sense related to Thomas Kuhn's notion in The Struct ure of Scientific Revolutions. Showing the presuppositions about and "takes '' on personhood together with the connections involved in the paradigms de epens the dilemmas we already know to be present.