RE: THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS: Representing Social and Political Acts

Abstract

This chapter presents the seven basic social acts and the triangle representation as a very useful set of tools in analyzing sociopolitical interactions. Each social act groups a set of inferences about the social situation it represents. A very large number of social conflicts, actions, and situations can be represented by combinations of this small set of social acts into causally connected structures. These larger structures, the triangles, are built from the social acts, their causal relations, plus some static information about the social situation not captured by the individual social acts. There is, however, a significant difference between the basic social acts and the primitive physical acts of CD: each social act may be decomposed into a structure built out of CD primitive acts, states, and causal connections. The development of social acts or equivalent structures for a different domain does not signify that are abandoning the primitive acts of CD. Each representation is useful in its own domain of understanding.