1008 Russell’s conjugation, a comedic British play on the I, you, he conjugation of verbs in Romance languages, may present three elements in two dichotomies.  So, the word play should be on the I, you, he and we conjugation of verbs, but the we is left out. I am the focus.  You contrasts with me.  He is not the contrast between me and you.  Plus, he contrasts with we in a special sort of way.  We are supposed to agree with him.

1009 Enfield’s example?

I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig headed fool.

1010 Does that imply that we agree with the pig-headed fool?

Well, he is a pig-headed fool because he does not agree with me.

So, we should agree with me.

After all, Lord knows, we are not pig-headed fools.

1012 Here is a picture of the corresponding Greimas square.

1013 Unlike the Abu Ghraib Greimas square, where the informant is in slot C, the above Greimas square has the reporter in slot A.  That is the one who “we” (D) end up agreeing with.

Okay, the audience for Russell’s conjugation is supposed to agree with the speaker.

Plus, that initial response contains an implicit abstraction that asks, more or less, “Why would the presenter lie to me?”

1014 According to Comments on Michael Tomasello’s Arc of Inquiry (1999-2019) (available at smashwords and other e-book venues, and appearing, for most part, in Razie Mah’s blog for January, February and March 2024), hand talk initially adapts to the social circle of the team.  Everything that is said in a team is sensible, because hand talk pictures and points to its referents.  Plus, the main incentives to perform hand talk are to be productive and to have fun.  Dishonesty and misconstrual are not rewarded in team work.

1015 After the domestication of fire, hand talk becomes fully linguistic as it adapts to the social circle of the community.  That includes all social circles within the community.

With fully linguistic hand talk, nonsensical statements can be made.  Some of these counterintuitive statements turn out to be very adaptive, because they provide insights that could not be rendered using sensible construction.  Indeed, social construction is not necessarily what makes counterintuitive statements adaptive.  Rather, it is the sensible constructionthat builds on social construction that produces the payoff.

Social construction is the meaning underlying the word, “religion”.

1016 My Paleolithic example has one of the deer hunting team say, in hand talk, the following.

[STORM] [TEETH][COLD][BITES]

1017 This counter-intuitive statement_2a frames the referent_2a, [STORM], and its sequela, [COLD], as a predator [TEETH][BITES].

We agree with the speaker by allowing the frame to prime the referent_2a for our imagination_1b.

And, in doing so, we activate a perspective-level potential_1c.

1018 Here are the elements of Enfield’s interscope that are activated in the Greimas square version of Russell’s conjugation.

1019 So, “we” implicitly abstract agreement with the one who is talking, in the Lebenswelt that we evolved in, because everyone who talks to “us” is either on our team or in our community.

Why would the presenter lie?