Title: It’s personal and it’s fine

Abstract: Believing is something that one does, or so one might say. Seeing as well. Detecting the edges of objects is not. Believing is a personal state. Seeing as well. Detecting is a sub-personal event or process. The personal/sub-personal distinction is intuitive. In recent papers, some have argued that it is problematic. I argue that it is not. Two criticisms are that it is not principled (cf. Mason Westfall) and that it potentially stifles the work of cognitive scientists by misdescribing their practices (cf. Robert Rupert.) The personal/sub-personal distinction, as applied to states, is a special case of a distinction between the state something is in and the states its parts are in. Further commitments are not necessary and only come down the line. As a consequence, one can both take it that there is such a distinction in cognitive science and that it puts no external constraint on the activity of cognitive scientists