↩ SocioRhetoric · A New Catalogue of Speech Acts
sociorhetoric · a speech act
“Realistically, we have no choice.” Said before the first agenda item, this settles nothing — and decides everything. A frame-set fixes what kind of situation this is before any argument starts, and its one felicity condition is going unchallenged for the next few turns. Silence ratifies.
joint custody · this act is held with ExploRational, where the same move, read cognitively rather than socially, is Setting the problem — choosing what the problem is before any solving starts.
Watch the first thirty seconds of any meeting and you will see a small declaration performed on the conversation itself. “This is a safety issue.” “We're all friends here.” “This is a negotiation, not a conversation.” None of these is an argument; each is a ruling on what game is being played, and therefore on which later moves will count as reasonable, aggressive, loyal, or beside the point. Goffman called the ruled-on thing a frame; the catalogue calls the move that installs one a frame-set, and files it as a declaration aimed not at the world but at the frame itself — coordinate five, direction: meta.
What makes the act strange is its success condition. An assertion is felicitous when things are as it says; a frame-set has nothing to be true of, yet it can plainly succeed or fail. It succeeds by uptake: if the next few speakers talk under the frame — or merely fail to fight it — the ruling hardens into the room's common sense, and every unchallenged turn makes it dearer to reopen. If someone re-sets at once, the ruling was only ever an opinion. The instrument below turns that felicity condition into arithmetic: twelve speakers, eighty turns, one standing frame, and a challenge price that climbs with every turn the frame survives.
the honest instrument
Frame A is set at turn 0 with a head start — allies aligned before anyone else speaks. Each turn one of twelve speakers either ratifies the standing frame (more likely the more of the room it already holds) or weighs a re-set, whose price is c(t) = 0.15 + 0.55·u — a challenge gets dearer as uptake u grows. The world interferes: misfit events peel a participant off the frame and depress ratification until the frame digests them. The displayed values are computed live from those rules; the frame texts are staging and feed nothing.
The frame-competition model
twelve speakers · eighty turns · one standing frame at a time
the standing frame
“Realistically, we have no choice.”
Frame texts are staging, not inputs — the model tracks only uptake, cost, and misfit.
allies aligned at turn 0 — u₀ = 1/12 + h
chance per turn the world contradicts the frame
how dear a challenge a dissenter will still raise
Reduced motion is on — meetings are drawn complete instead of played.
what to try
Load uncontested and let it play. Across the two thousand meetings in the right panel, 99.9% lock in, at median turn 13, with 0.12 challenges per meeting — the frame wins by silence, before most of the room has spoken. Now drag misfit rate to 0.40: lock-in collapses to 27.4% of meetings, and the ones that still lock do so at median turn 56.
Hold misfit at 0.20 and sweep boldness. At b = 0.30, dissenters raise only 0.93 challenges per meeting — and win 99.7% of them, because a challenge that cheap only clears the cost bar once the frame is already dying. At b = 1.00 they raise 14.61 and win 65.1%. Timidity fights corpses; boldness fights standing frames.
At misfit 0.20 and boldness 0.55, sweep head start. With h = 0 the meeting locks at median turn 23 and burns through 4.11 frames; with h = 0.50 it locks at median turn 7 on 1.81 frames. Arriving with allies does not win the argument — it shortens the window in which there can be one.
the closing window
The model's one asymmetry explains most of what you see: ratifying is free and challenging is priced, at c(t) = 0.15 + 0.55·u. A frame at its floor costs 0.15 to fight; a frame holding the whole room costs 0.70. So every turn spoken under the frame — and every turn of mere silence, which leaves uptake compounding untouched — moves the price. This is the felicity condition made mechanical: a frame-set does not need agreement, it needs a few unchallenged turns, because those turns close the window in which fighting it is cheap. Under the uncontested dials the window closes fast — half of all meetings are locked by turn 13, and a dissenter who finally objects at turn 30 faces a price their boldness of 0.35 can no longer clear.
The dials carve the act's three careers. Low misfit and low boldness is the committee where “realistically, we have no choice” becomes the minutes. High misfit is a frame at war with the evidence: at m = 0.40 the room ends the meeting only 53.8% behind the standing frame, and the challenges that do come succeed 92.1% of the time — by then the world has done the challenger's work. And a bold room with no head start is the frame war: 16.56 challenges and 12.36 frames per meeting, yet 76.0% of those meetings still end locked, around turn 33. Even wars end with somebody's construal as common sense; the contest is over whose, and it is settled disproportionately by who moved first and who stayed silent early.
model
Uptake u is the share of twelve participants aligned with the standing frame, starting at 1/12 + h. Each of eighty turns runs four rules. Misfit: with probability m, an event contradicts the frame — one participant peels off and the event lingers as pressure P. Ratify: with probability u − 0.10·P, the turn is spoken under the frame; u rises by 1/12 and the frame digests half an anomaly. Challenge: otherwise, with probability b − c(t), a re-set is attempted; it succeeds with probability (1 − u) + 0.10·P — the unconvinced plus the anomalies. Success installs the challenger's frame at 1/12 + 0.35·(1 − u) and clears P; failure entrenches the old frame by 1/12. Silence: if no challenge clears the bar, nothing moves — except that the frame has survived another turn.
The ensemble panel replays two thousand such meetings from a fixed seed, so its numbers are exact for these rules rather than estimates by eye; the calibration figures quoted on this page come from running the same functions headless in Node. Lock-in is strict: uptake at or above 0.8 held to the end of the meeting — a spike that touches the threshold and falls back does not count. Treat it as a toy model. It isolates one mechanism — uptake compounding against a rising challenge price — and says nothing about power, agenda control, or who gets the floor, which real frame-setters manage as carefully as their wording.
the act ↔ the model
| The act | The model |
|---|---|
| the frame | the standing construal of what kind of situation this is; exactly one holds the floor at a time. |
| uptake u | the felicity condition as a quantity — the share of the room currently talking under the frame. |
| head start h | the first-mover's privilege: allies aligned before the first open turn. |
| a ratifying turn | any contribution that presupposes the frame; it converts one more participant and normalises a standing anomaly. |
| silence | the turn that changes nothing and thereby ratifies — the frame ages one turn, and c(t) keeps its gains. |
| c(t) = 0.15 + 0.55·u | the rising price of re-opening what the room has settled. |
| misfit event | the world declining to fit the construal — evidence the frame must digest or bleed uptake to. |
| successful re-set | a rival frame-set with uptake: the challenger plus a share of the unconvinced become the new standing frame. |
| lock-in | the frame as common sense — uptake ≥ 0.8 held to the end, after which challenges rarely clear the bar. |
how this act misfires
misfire · the contested frame
The catalogue's misfire for every meta-directed act is frame collision: two construals of the situation in play at once, neither jointly held. A frame-set caught within its first few turns is at its cost floor — c(t) barely above 0.15 — so a counter-ruling is cheap and lands often. Openings are therefore fought over. In the frame war preset the collision is chronic: 12.36 frames per meeting, each ruling overruled, until one accumulates enough silent turns to become expensive. The act's vulnerability is scheduling: it is strongest before it is noticed and weakest the moment it is answered in kind.
misfire · the stale frame
A frame that once fit can be contradicted into irrelevance while still officially standing. Raise the misfit dial and watch the mechanism: each event peels a participant and lingers as pressure, ratification falters, and the meeting ends with the standing frame holding barely half the room — 53.8% mean final uptake at m = 0.40, with only 27.4% of meetings locking at all. Note who profits: challenges under heavy misfit succeed 92.1% of the time, because the frame is already hollow when they arrive. The stale frame is Surrogation's cousin on the meta axis — a construal outliving the situation it construed.
misfire · the too-visible frame
A frame-set works while it passes as description. “Why are you framing this as a safety issue?” converts the ruling back into a move — visible, authored, optional — and a move can be declined. That conversion is its own act, Frame-break in the catalogue, and it is the one challenge whose price does not rise with uptake, because it is not played inside the frame at all. The model cannot represent it: every challenger here offers a rival construal, but the frame-breaker refuses the construal-game itself. Against a frame-break, a frame-set has no defence except having already become the room's common sense.
A frame-set is a declaration performed on the conversation; it asks for no agreement, only a few unchallenged turns — and every silent turn raises the price of the challenge that never came.
can you use it?
RECOGNITION — Which is a frame-set? A: “I disagree with the third bullet.” B: “Before we start — this is a personnel matter, so let's keep it in this room.” C: “Could we push the deadline a week?”
B. It rules on what kind of situation this is (confidential, personnel, not strategy), which fixes what later moves are legal — before any item is discussed. A argues inside a standing frame; C is a directive played on the board someone else set.
THE NEAREST NEIGHBOR — Mid-meeting, someone answers “this is a negotiation, not a conversation” with “interesting that you need this to be a negotiation.” Which act is that, and what separates it from a rival frame-set?
Frame-break — same coordinates as frame-set, opposite work. A rival frame-set offers another construal and pays c(t) to install it; the frame-break names the standing construal as a move, which denies it the invisibility it needs. It collapses the frame without proposing one, and its price does not rise with uptake.
PRODUCTION — You want your next status meeting read as “early experiment” rather than “missed commitments.” Compose the frame-set, then check it against the model.
“A reminder before the numbers: this is week three of a probe we expected to be wrong about.” The check: set it at turn zero (the cost floor), arrive with a head start (brief an ally to speak under it early), and count the next few turns — if they pass unchallenged, uptake compounds and the frame holds; if someone re-sets at once, you have an argument, not a frame.