The Logos Schema

A coordinate system for social communication — not a taxonomy, not a borrowed framework. Coordinates. Null until an inference lands. Designed to be deformed by the data.

The right scale. The zone between an individual and nearby society — family, friends, local community — is where genuine communication happens before it gets processed into institutional form. Below this scale it becomes individual psychology. Above it, language has already been sanitized: laws, journalism, and organizational records are outputs of that process, not the thing itself. The logos schema operates in the pre-institutional zone.

The functional schema — logos_schema_v01.json. What communication does. Seven coordinate axes drawn from the most abstract, sparse social science material:

  • act_type — what the utterance does: assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, declaration (Austin, Searle)
  • transmission — how it moves: broadcast, leak, archive
  • resonance — the emotional field it creates: harmony, friction, illusion
  • authority — what power it draws on: sovereign, tribal, occult
  • utility — what it’s functionally for: instruction, narrative, currency
  • cooperative — whether Grice’s maxims are honored, violated, or suspended; violation generates implicature
  • social_field — Douglas grid/group as two 0.0–1.0 axes

The structural schema — perplexity_suggested_v02.json. Where communication occurs in social space. Seven ordered axes (self → global): scale, density, persistence, authority, transmission, memory_channel, language_mode. Layers are coordinate points, not social labels. Cross-cutting overlays (family, culture, religion, society) span multiple layers — religion has no size bound, it crosses the Dunbar frame by design.

The combined file — logos_combined_v01.json. Both schemas held in tension in one file. The _relationship block names what is known, what is unknown, and where the two schemas overlap — authority and transmission appear in both at different resolutions. A model reading this file sees a problem to reason about, not a settled answer.

The social container — logos_social_v01.json. Dunbar group-size thresholds (1, 5, 15, 150, 500, 1500) as coordinate layers, each carrying signify dimensions as hypotheses. At the culture threshold (500), cooperative status flips from honored to violated and resonance becomes illusion — the phase transition where the status quo operator begins. Tension is derived (not a peer of signify/social_neurology), operators are first-class per layer, _inferences: [] makes deformation auditable.

The structure/function dichotomy. Functional (what communication does) and structural (where it occurs) cannot be reduced to each other — same as anatomy vs physiology in biology, structural vs functional linguistics. The product is a 2×2 space with the founding analog/digital tension: analog-structural, analog-functional, digital-structural, digital-functional. The tension score now has two independent axes.

All schemas carry _meta.status: "hypothesis — designed to be deformed by the inference store". Evolution is the quality control mechanism.

Live at wholesystemsmodel.org/repos/pillars/logos/

Part of the Dimensional Fields project.