Abstract: The dominant classical conceptual toolkits of social cognition primarily originate from the creations of scientists or philosophers of cognitive sciences in the 1980s. From the perspective of long-term history, the ongoing theoretical disputes in social cognition today are an extension of broader struggles between two generations of cognitive sciences. Social cognition, having embraced the fundamental tenets of cognitivism, also wholly incorporates its attendant theoretical burdens. As social psychology transitions into a sub-domain of information processing psychology, its historical route during the early periods of social cognition—which predates the cognitive revolution of 1956—has been inadvertently discarded and destroyed. This has led to the drastic theoretical ramification of “person” perception being forcibly diminished to “thing” perception. “Social cognition” has not always had the theoretical difficulty of devaluing persons to things, at least not during its early periods. This paper seeks to revisit and refine the “persons are not things” thesis (The PANT Thesis) from the early period of social cognition, aiming to offer a constructive proposal to address the theoretical challenges facing contemporary social cognition mainly through the lens of Fritz Heider's object theory. This proposal emerges not simply out of speculative retrospection, but is problem-oriented and has significant reciprocated ties with fresh evidence from cognitive neuroscience. Although this proposal has indeed revived the traditional historical route and classic thesis of early social cognition predating the 1956 cognitive revolution, it has comprehensively incorporated the debates and attempts to transcend the disputes spanning over three decades between two generations of cognitive sciences, indeed.
The abstraction principle of cognition in information processing psychology has always been unable to be well applied to “social” cognition. If the abstraction principle of cognition applies to a universal object and differentiates the living/animate person and the non-living/inanimate thing as distinctive sub-categories of objects, it should naturally extend to the sub-domain of social cognition. However, this abstraction principle is primarily derived from the abstraction of non-living objects (things, machines, computers). Accordingly, its application to living objects (persons, agents) merely appends the prefix “social” to “cognition.” Thus, the information processing psychology of “things” hardly facilitates basic requirements of social cognition—“would stoop to any way to learn more about a person,” the phenomena of the person, the experience of the person, the knowledge of the person.
The PANT Thesis inherently posits that there are categorical distinctions between a “person” and a “thing” as perceptual objects, although both belong to the general category of (perceptual) objects. Thus, this thesis mainly contains two parts of theoretical components in defining objects: defining general objects and the person-thing object distinction (the latter in the contemporary context also involves the animate-inanimate distinction). This paper reviews and refines this thesis in two sections. Section 4 arranges a system of perceptual object theory based on the person-thing distinction resorting to insights from Heider's text. Next, section 5 further confirms the independence and fundamentality of person perception as different from thing perception drawing upon contemporary new experimental evidence and new neural pathway hypotheses.
In the end, while both the abstraction principle of cognition as favored by information processing psychology and the PANT Thesis of early social cognition uphold the objectives of autonomy in social cognition, they take contrasting approaches. The abstraction principle of cognition engenders an epistemological reduction, which results in person perception being diminished to thing perception. The PANT Thesis, proficiently addresses this theoretical challenge, thereby reinforcing theoretical autonomy and unity within social cognition.

Key words: social cognition, person perception, cognitive revolution, animacy, intersubjectivity