The Case for Distributed Definitional Dynamics
Collective judgment is rarely driven by raw facts alone. Instead, it moves through a complex cognitive infrastructure—the historically formed, socially distributed definitions through which populations make consequential things intelligible. When institutions, leaders, or symbols become the centers of bitter public dispute, the underlying conflict is rarely a disagreement over physical composition or basic historical records; it is a contest over what those objects are in collective life.
Distributed Definitional Dynamics establishes a rigorous framework for studying these competing understandings. By examining how definitions form, circulate, and acquire institutional authority, this research program moves beyond simplistic summaries of "public opinion" to investigate the structural mechanisms that govern trust, legitimacy, and social change.
This article summarizes a more deeply technical, work-in-progress paper titled "QBC and Distributed Definitional Dynamics - The Cognitive Infrastructure of Collective Life", which forms the basis under which the author is seeking fellow researchers. If you are interested, see contact information at the end of this article.
The Cognitive Infrastructure of Collective Life
People do not act toward institutions, nations, companies or one another on the basis of facts alone. They act through understandings of what those things are. These understandings have structure, histories and unequal power. Bringing them into a common field of research could change how we explain collective judgment—and why efforts to change it succeed or fail.
Imagine a monument that has stood in a public square for a century. Its bronze figure has not changed. The inscription remains legible. The person it commemorates has been dead for generations. Yet the monument becomes the center of an increasingly bitter dispute.
To some residents, it embodies courage and continuity. To others, it represents the public honoring of injustice. One group regards its removal as an assault on collective memory; another regards its continued presence as an insult renewed every morning.
What, exactly, is the dispute about?
The physical object is the same. The historical record may contain genuine uncertainties, but even agreement about the relevant events need not settle the matter. The residents can disagree about which actions define the person, what public commemoration means, whose experience deserves recognition and what preserving or removing the statue would say about the community.
They are contesting what the monument is: not its composition, dimensions or location, but its place in collective life.
This kind of definition is neither a decorative interpretation laid over reality nor a dictionary entry awaiting correction. It helps organize what people notice, what they infer, whom they trust and what conduct they consider justified. When competing definitions attach to an object that matters, the consequences can extend far beyond language.
A court can be understood as a guardian of justice or an instrument of domination. A company can be understood as a dependable provider or an exploitative intermediary. The same political leader can signify protection to one population and danger to another. In each case, the name continues to identify its target while the understandings attached to it diverge.
These understandings constitute distributed definitions: the patterns of category, attribution, expectation, feeling, legitimacy and identity through which populations make socially consequential things intelligible. Their distribution is part of the phenomenon. There need not be one public definition beneath the disagreement, waiting for researchers to uncover it. The disagreement can itself be the enduring public condition.
The case for studying these definitions together is stronger than the familiar observation that people see things differently. It is that the differences possess a recurring structure, arise through identifiable processes and bear on consequential decisions. They can be reconstructed, followed through time and tested against outcomes.
Distributed definitional dynamics names this proposed field of inquiry. Its central claim is that definitions form part of the cognitive infrastructure of collective life. A society’s judgments and actions depend partly on what its members take consequential things to be—and on which of those understandings become prevalent, visible, authoritative or effective in directing conduct.
Understanding that infrastructure deserves a research program commensurate with its importance.
The definition beneath the word
Ordinary definitions begin with category and difference. What kind of thing is this, and what distinguishes it from other things of that kind?
In collective life, those questions open onto a larger structure.
Consider patriot. A conventional definition might refer to love of country. But applying it requires judgments that the general wording does not settle. Does a patriot obey the government or challenge it? Is criticism an expression of fidelity or evidence of disloyalty? Which historical figures exemplify patriotism? Which acts disqualify someone from claiming it?
People can agree on the general wording while carrying substantially different answers to these questions. They can recognize the same word without sharing the criteria through which it organizes their judgments.
The operative definition includes those criteria. It contains examples, exceptions and boundaries. It also contains an account of causes and motives: why someone acted, what that action reveals and what should be expected next. It can confer admiration, suspicion, moral standing or disgrace. It can make affiliation with an object seem honorable, embarrassing or dangerous.
This is why a change in definition need not announce itself as a change in vocabulary. A familiar term can remain in use while its exemplary figures, emotional associations, implications for identity and recommended treatment undergo substantial revision. The dictionary sentence may survive a transformation in the social work the word performs.
Nor must people be able to state their operative definitions in polished sentences. Someone who struggles to explain what makes a leader legitimate may nevertheless identify legitimate and illegitimate cases, distinguish acceptable from unacceptable conduct and make consistent judgments about who deserves obedience. Such responses disclose parts of an understanding that a direct request for a definition might miss.
The object of research is therefore not just what respondents say when asked, “What does this mean?” It is the structured understanding revealed through descriptions, classifications, examples, attributed motives, emotional responses and judgments about appropriate action.
Calling this understanding a definition is useful because it directs attention beneath the final verdict. Approval tells something important about a person’s response. It does not necessarily reveal what is being approved, why it deserves approval or which change would overturn the judgment.
Suppose two people both admire an institution. One admires its restraint: it prevents powerful actors from exceeding their authority. The other admires its decisiveness: it enables powerful actors to accomplish their purposes. Their favorable attitudes can be equally strong while resting on understandings that point toward opposite responses to the next consequential event.
An approval measure records their present agreement. A reconstruction of their definitions could reveal the conditions under which that agreement would break.
That is an explanatory opportunity, not merely a terminological preference.
Some definitions matter far more than others. A difference in association becomes especially consequential when it affects access, affiliation, legitimacy, protection, punishment or the allocation of resources. Such definitions are load-bearing: changing them changes something in the organization of collective life. Attention alone is insufficient. A fashionable expression may attract extensive discussion without altering an important decision; an obscure institutional classification may determine who is admitted, excluded or recognized.
This distinction suggests a testable expectation. Where competing definitions carry larger consequences for status, authority or resources, stronger efforts to preserve or revise them should follow. The expectation need not hold universally to be informative, but its scope must be established rather than assumed. A study that finds no relationship between independently measured stakes and definitional contest, after accounting for exposure and frequency, would count against it.
The theory begins to earn its value when it generates questions of this kind: questions that an assertion that “meaning matters” leaves unspecified.
From brands to a larger human process
The underlying structure is particularly visible in a familiar commercial problem: the difference between what a company says it is and what people understand it to be.
A company can choose a name, commission a logo and publish a statement of purpose. None of these acts, by itself, establishes a substantial public understanding. A newly registered name known only to its founder identifies a business without yet carrying an operative brand.
A brand develops when the target acquires accumulated, differentiated and consequential meaning among people whose responses matter to it. Customers acquire expectations. Employees acquire accounts of how the organization behaves. Competitors position it against alternatives. Other audiences associate it with particular purposes, practices or identities.
The brand is this distributed definition, not merely the sign through which people retrieve it. A logo can call up the definition; it is not the whole of what is called up.
This account separates three things that need to remain distinct.
First: Branding is purposive action intended to shape the definition. Brand formation is the larger set of traceable processes through which the definition is produced and changed. The brand is the resulting distributed state.
Suppose a product fails. The failure may change what customers expect of its manufacturer, even though nobody intended to communicate unreliability. That is brand formation without branding. A campaign designed to restore confidence is branding. A competitor’s deliberate attempt to portray the manufacturer as unsafe is adversarial branding. The fact that these efforts might fail does not make them something else: purpose identifies the activity; audience uptake establishes its result.
The distinction has considerable explanatory force. It prevents communication from swallowing conduct. It also prevents managerial intention from being mistaken for public understanding. A company participates in the formation of its brand, but does not issue the audience’s final judgment by executive order.
The broader implication is not that all collective life should be redescribed as marketing. It is that commercial branding belongs to a larger human process.
A named institution, a public figure and a political movement can likewise acquire accumulated definitions among populations whose responses affect their standing and prospects. An inherited category such as patriot or religion can organize inclusion, exclusion and judgment without functioning as a brand in the same sense.
Second: The distinction between a general category and an identifiable target must survive. “Patriot” can designate a disputed category. A movement named “Patriot” can additionally become a particular object with a history, rivals and consequential audiences.
Every brand is a distributed definition under this account; not every distributed definition is a brand.
These larger perspectives brings neighboring fields into a common problem without declaring their subjects interchangeable. Linguistics investigates conventional meaning and its variation. Psychology studies attitudes, stereotypes and judgment. Political communication examines framing. Sociology investigates classification, legitimacy and boundaries. Brand and reputation research follows the understandings attached to identifiable targets.
These are resources for a general account. The difficulty arises when the divisions among research specialties become divisions in the explanation of an event.
The public understanding of a court does not consist of a linguistic object on Monday, a reputation on Tuesday and a question of legitimacy on Wednesday. These aspects coexist. A judgment about the court’s motives can change the interpretation of its conduct; that interpretation can affect legitimacy; legitimacy can alter what obedience signifies about a citizen’s identity.
Third: Studying each component remains necessary. Studying their relations is necessary as well. The scholarly partition identifies useful pieces while leaving the integrated process insufficiently specified.
The proposed advance lies there: in treating the configuration and movement of these distinguishable components as an object of explanation.
This does not require assuming that every dimension is always active, or that all dimensions move together. On the contrary, a useful account must explain their separation. Competence can remain intact while legitimacy collapses. Familiarity can increase while trust declines. Emotional attachment can persist after confidence in performance has disappeared.
A theory that preserves these possibilities can ask better questions than one that treats every change as an improvement or deterioration in “image.”
A public without a single mind
Distributed definitions do not require a collective consciousness above individual minds. They require a population in which identifiable understandings recur, vary, cluster and acquire unequal influence.
That distinction changes the unit of analysis.
Imagine two equally sized groups whose views of an institution initially lie close together. Over time, one group becomes more favorable and the other more hostile. Their movements can cancel in an aggregate measure. The average remains steady while the social situation becomes substantially less stable.
Nothing mysterious has happened. The summary has discarded the information needed to describe the change.
The same error can arise within a nominal group. A demographic or political label does not establish internal agreement about what an institution represents. Researchers must discover the distribution rather than assign one definition to everyone who shares a convenient category. The relevant questions concern patterns of agreement, divergence and overlap, including disagreements within communities.
Even a complete account of how many people hold each definition would not explain its social power.
Four properties must be distinguished. Prevalence is how widely a definition is held. Visibility is how widely it is encountered. Institutional authority is the force it possesses in official classifications and procedures. Behavioral efficacy is its relationship to consequential action.
They can move independently. A description repeated everywhere may be accepted by relatively few people. A majority understanding may lack institutional recognition. An official classification may shape decisions despite widespread rejection.
Return to the imagined monument. A description can dominate public debate because its advocates possess the means to repeat it. That establishes visibility, not necessarily majority acceptance. A smaller body entrusted with the square’s administration might determine the monument’s official treatment. Its decision establishes an institutional outcome, not the disappearance of competing understandings.
The question “Which definition won?” is incomplete until the arena of victory is specified.
This is also where power becomes part of the mechanism rather than a general background condition. The ability to publish a description differs from the ability to place it in a curriculum. The ability to attract attention differs from the ability to make a classification govern eligibility. The ability to persuade differs from the ability to impose a penalty for noncompliance.
These capacities determine how a definition can become operative even when it does not become consensual.
A research design must consequently follow both numbers and authority. A representative population sample can reveal prevalence. A separate examination of actors who control classifications, procedures, distribution and sanctions can reveal how particular understandings acquire disproportionate consequences. Neither inquiry can substitute for the other, and their findings should not be blended into a percentage that disguises the distinction.
The merit of this approach is immediate: it makes possible an explanation of conditions that otherwise look contradictory. Public rejection can coexist with institutional continuity. Intense visibility can coexist with limited adoption. Widespread agreement can coexist with an inability to act.
These are not exceptional complications around an otherwise uniform process. They are configurations the theory is designed to distinguish.
How an understanding becomes durable
A definition does not begin anew whenever a message arrives. The audience already possesses expectations, memories and classifications through which the message will be interpreted.
This prior state is causally important.
Suppose a manufacturer acknowledges a failure. A customer who regards it as fundamentally dependable might interpret the acknowledgment as evidence of candor. A customer who regards it as deceptive might interpret the same statement as an admission extracted by circumstances. A third might revise the judgment of technical competence while leaving the judgment of honesty largely unchanged.
These are possibilities to investigate, not responses to assume. They illustrate why the public effect of a message cannot be read directly from its wording.
At least four things must be separated: what an actor intended to communicate, what the message and conduct actually conveyed, what particular audiences inferred and what remained in their understanding afterward. An analysis confined to advertisements, speeches or official statements measures attempted defining. It does not establish successful defining.
Between initial interpretation and durable understanding lies social experience. A peer can reinforce an inference. An institution can authorize it. A rival account can challenge it. Direct experience can supply confirmation or contradiction. Repetition can keep an interpretation accessible without persuading anyone who rejects it.
The causal task is to follow these transitions: prior understanding, exposure, interpretation, social validation, retention and diffusion. It must then follow the consequences back into the process. Conduct undertaken in response to one definition can produce events that become evidence for another.
This feedback is one reason definitions deserve to be studied dynamically rather than as collections of associations captured at one moment. A representation can affect conduct toward its target; the target’s response can then alter the representation. The history matters because later interpretations inherit conditions produced by earlier ones.
The monument provides a useful illustration. Its placement once expressed a judgment by particular actors with particular authority. Continued maintenance might subsequently make that judgment seem like a settled feature of the town. Later residents need not encounter the original argument for commemoration; they encounter its durable public result. A new dispute can reopen what had become routine.
Following such a process requires more than a date for “the change.”
A new definition can be proposed before it becomes visible. It can become visible before a community adopts it. One community can adopt it while another resists. An institution can codify it before broad public acceptance or long afterward. Conduct can change without durable conviction, and conviction can persist without an opportunity for action.
Definitional change therefore runs on several clocks. The researcher must distinguish changes in content from changes in circulation, acceptance, authority and consequence. An overnight transformation in public attention does not demonstrate an overnight transformation in public understanding.
This distinction offers a substantial improvement in the study of persuasion and social change. It separates an immediate response from a retained one, an audience reached from an audience changed, and a temporary shift from an inherited understanding.
It also allows a more exact account of failure. A campaign may fail because it never reaches the relevant population, because it is interpreted differently from its intention, because trusted sources reject it, or because its initial effect does not survive experience. These are different failures with different causes. A single measure taken immediately after exposure cannot reliably distinguish them.
Reality is not a public vote
The explanatory importance of definitions does not make reality dependent on agreement.
A defective product can remain favorably regarded. An honest person can be considered corrupt. An institution can possess formal authority while being regarded as illegitimate. The discrepancy between an object’s condition and its public representation is itself something to explain.
Material performance, observable conduct and documented events therefore remain independent sources of evidence. They exert pressure on definitions through experience and consequence, although they do not guarantee that all audiences will interpret them alike.
Without this distinction, the inquiry would become a closed circulation of representations explaining other representations. There would be no adequate basis for asking whether a public understanding is accurate, distorted, selective, delayed or resistant to evidence.
The fact that a false accusation has consequences does not make the accusation true. It makes the formation and persistence of the false understanding consequential.
Nor does the theory claim that every disagreement is ultimately a disagreement about definitions. People can agree about a term and dispute whether it applies to the facts. They can agree about the facts and disagree about moral obligations. They can share both an understanding and a value while pursuing incompatible interests.
Residents debating the monument might agree on the person’s conduct yet differ over what public commemoration should require. Clarifying the historical record would not necessarily resolve that difference. A science of definitions must identify the contribution of definitional disagreement without annexing factual, moral and material conflict to itself.
The same restraint makes cross-domain comparison stronger.
A person can answer an accusation and produce new evidence through conduct. A word cannot defend itself. An institution possesses procedures and powers that can survive public rejection. A product encounters tests through performance and use. Religious understandings draw on doctrine, revelation, scripture, ritual and sacred commitments; their formation cannot be reduced to the evaluation of a consumer product.
The recurring architecture lies in the questions: what is this, what distinguishes it, what purposes and consequences are attributed to it, what standing does it possess and what treatment does it warrant? The mechanisms through which answers form and change remain domain-specific.
This is not a concession that weakens the case for a general theory. It specifies what a successful general theory must accomplish. The goal is a common structure of explanation, not a universal mechanism that makes every object behave alike.
From an argument to a research program
The strongest case for further research is that the theory identifies both information that existing summaries can lose and ways to determine whether recovering that information improves explanation.
Consider a direct test of the distinction between attitude and definition.
Researchers could begin with people who express similarly favorable attitudes toward an institution. They could then investigate what those people believe the institution is for, whose interests it serves, what gives it legitimacy and what conduct they expect from it. If distinct configurations emerge, the next question is whether they help explain later responses to a consequential event.
The earlier example supplies the logic. People who value an institution for restraining authority may respond differently from those who value it for exercising authority, despite having given it the same initial approval rating.
A finding of that kind would not establish the entire theory. It would demonstrate a specific advantage of measuring the understanding beneath the evaluation. Conversely, if attitude alone reliably reconstructed the relevant differences and their consequences, the proposed distinction would have less explanatory value than claimed.
A stronger causal test would examine change. Participants could be assigned by chance to communications that foreground different aspects of the same factual account. Researchers would measure whether the communications alter category judgments, attributed motives, legitimacy or other specified components. Later observations would establish whether the changes persist and whether they affect independently measured decisions.
This does not assume that a successful message changes conduct, or that conduct reveals belief without ambiguity. Someone may distrust a company and still purchase its product because no practical alternative exists. Someone may reject an institution’s legitimacy and still comply because refusal is costly.
The causal test must therefore account for incentives, constraints, opportunities and prior conduct. A judgment about what action is warranted belongs in the definition state. The action itself remains an outcome to explain. Otherwise the theory would merely say that people acted because of an understanding inferred from the fact that they acted.
Other tests follow directly.
If subgroup distributions are more informative than population averages, they should explain consequential divergence that an average misses. If power structures the operation of definitions, visibility, authority and sanctions should contribute information beyond the number of people who hold a view. If temporal stages are genuinely distinct, separating exposure, adoption, institutionalization and persistence should improve the explanation of change.
Each proposition has an intelligible failure condition. Aggregate measures might capture all consequential variation in the tested settings. Power measures might add nothing beyond prevalence and content. The proposed temporal distinctions might collapse empirically without loss of explanation. Such findings would require revision rather than rhetorical accommodation.
The most demanding test concerns the theory as a whole.
A larger questionnaire will almost inevitably collect more information than a smaller one. That alone does not vindicate a new theoretical object. Integrated definition-state measures must explain or predict consequential outcomes beyond what can already be explained by attitude, familiarity, reputation, trust, ideology, exposure, demographic identity and prior behavior. The comparison must be against capable accounts of those established constructs, not weak substitutes.
If they do the explanatory work, the claim that distributed definitional dynamics constitutes a distinct general theory fails.
This requirement is the opposite of a theory designed to explain every possible result. It places the principal claim at risk.
The research program accordingly has three connected tasks. First, establish what relevant disciplines have already found and where their findings converge. Second, determine whether the proposed object is coherent, distinguish it from neighboring constructs and specify its boundaries. Third, build measurements and causal tests capable of showing which propositions survive, which require reconstruction and which fail.
These tasks should not be confused with three completed demonstrations. The convergence of existing work supplies grounds for the synthesis. The conceptual distinctions make the synthesis sufficiently definite to test. Its added empirical value remains the work to be done.
That is a strong position from which to begin research: a consequential problem, a specified explanatory structure and identifiable observations that could defeat it.
Measuring what cannot be read directly
The principal measurement challenge is not a shortage of possible observations. It is the temptation to treat one kind of observation as though it contained the others.
A record of language reveals what was expressed. It does not automatically reveal private conviction, sincerity, acceptance or the beliefs of people who did not speak. A hostile description can circulate because it is endorsed, quoted, mocked or rejected. Counting its appearances does not settle which process occurred.
Likewise, behavior reveals an action, not the complete understanding behind it. An institutional record establishes an official treatment, not population consensus. A direct question reveals what a person says in response to that question, not necessarily what comes spontaneously to mind in another setting.
The task is therefore reconstruction from several kinds of evidence. Open-ended descriptions can reveal unfamiliar content. Classification tasks can expose boundaries and exceptions. Questions about motives, competence and legitimacy can separate judgments that an overall approval measure merges. Behavioral observations, institutional records and material evidence can establish whether those understandings correspond to consequential differences outside the interview.
Before any of this, researchers must establish the referent.
“China” can call up a government, a population, a civilization, a territory or a source of manufactured goods. “Church” can refer to a building, congregation, hierarchy, tradition or theological body. An apparent disagreement can arise because respondents are answering about different objects. An apparent consensus can conceal the same problem.
Identifying what is being defined is not preliminary housekeeping. It is part of the measurement.
QBC and Distributed Definitional Dynamics - The Cognitive Infrastructure of Collective Life.pdf
Following definitions through time creates a deeper difficulty. The measuring instrument must remain stable enough to support comparison while remaining open enough to discover meanings its designers did not anticipate.
A question can retain identical wording while respondents change their understanding of what it asks. Yet continually revising every question would make successive observations difficult to compare. The solution is to retain stable anchors while allowing new content to enter through open-ended inquiry and supplementary questions. Overlapping samples can answer earlier and revised items, helping establish what remains comparable.
The researcher must then distinguish a faulty instrument from a genuine change in interpretation. Treating every altered response as measurement error would erase the phenomenon. Treating every altered response as discovery would protect an unreliable instrument.
QBC and Distributed Definitional Dynamics - The Cognitive Infrastructure of Collective Life.pdf
Computational tools belong inside this process, not above it. They can locate changing associations in large collections of text and identify patterns worth investigating. They cannot turn public language into an unmediated reading of minds.
The same principle applies to a language model’s account of what a population believes. A fluent description is a candidate interpretation, not an observation of the population. It becomes useful evidence only through the appropriate relationship to sources, people and independent validation.
Historical research requires the same discipline under different evidentiary conditions.
The monument’s earlier meanings cannot be recovered by surveying its original audience. Researchers must examine correspondence, newspapers, speeches, administrative decisions, educational materials and other surviving traces. Those traces were produced by particular people for particular purposes. Their survival reflects later choices about preservation, collection and digitization.
An archive can reveal that a definition circulated through specified institutions, received official support and encountered opposition. It cannot necessarily establish the percentage of a population that accepted it. A very large collection remains unrepresentative when its missing voices are systematically different from those it preserves.
There is also no guarantee that the observer remains outside the process. Publishing a classification can give it visibility. Describing a community as holding a particular view can supply language later adopted by that community or its opponents. Institutions may incorporate research categories into procedures.
These effects should be recorded and examined. When a measurement becomes a public resource, it can also become a definitional intervention. That possibility is another testable part of the process, not an exemption from scientific scrutiny.
Why the inquiry is worth pursuing
The case for distributed definitional dynamics does not depend on claiming that no one has previously studied meaning, power or collective judgment. It depends on the explanatory cost of studying their connections inadequately.
A change in trust is not necessarily a change in perceived competence. A decline in legitimacy is not necessarily a decline in formal authority. Increased attention is not necessarily increased acceptance. Continued compliance is not necessarily continued belief.
When these differences are lost, explanations become imprecise and responses can address the wrong problem. More information about performance may not answer a dispute about legitimate purpose. A communication campaign may receive credit for a change caused by direct experience. Public silence may be mistaken for agreement. A stable average may conceal the widening division that makes a later crisis possible.
A research program that can distinguish these conditions would offer more than a richer descriptive vocabulary. It could improve the explanation of how institutions retain or lose standing, how public understandings survive contradictory events, how communities diverge and how particular definitions become consequential without becoming widely accepted.
Those are prospective gains, not results that should be announced before the tests. But they are sufficiently important, and the routes to testing them sufficiently definite, to justify sustained investigation.
Defeasibility belongs at the center of that justification. It means that the account is answerable to evidence capable of changing it. A causal relationship may hold within one domain and not another. A proposed dimension may prove redundant. A supposed common structure may fail when translated across populations or languages. The claim to a distinct general theory may fail altogether if established constructs explain its apparent contribution.
The appropriate response would be to revise or relinquish the claim at the level the evidence requires. What would remain is not nothing: the research would have clarified where existing explanations suffice, which distinctions matter and where integration produces genuine gains. The program’s explicit tests of separation, added explanatory value, cross-domain comparability and replication make those outcomes possible.
There is no need to choose between intellectual ambition and this discipline. The ambition is to explain a consequential class of processes across collective life. The discipline is to make every extension earn its place.
The monument in the square brings the issue back into view. A satisfactory explanation would not merely record that public opinion changed. It would distinguish what changed in the understanding of the commemorated person, what changed in the meaning of commemoration, which populations changed, which resisted, what evidence or pressures mattered and how particular understandings acquired authority over the monument’s treatment.
It would preserve the historical facts while examining their interpretation. It would distinguish moral disagreement from disagreement about the record. It would follow the relationship between public understanding and institutional action without assuming that either simply mirrors the other.
The bronze alone cannot explain the dispute. Neither can the words alone. The explanation lies partly in the historically formed, socially distributed definitions through which the object becomes a reason to honor, defend, oppose or remove.
That relationship is already at work wherever people decide what deserves trust, what possesses authority, who belongs and what ought to be done. It warrants more than occasional recognition under separate disciplinary names. It warrants a common, demanding and falsifiable program of inquiry.
In conclusion: Definitions do not determine everything that happens in collective life. They help establish the cognitive terms under which people recognize what is happening and decide how to respond. A fuller science of collective life must explain how those terms are made, how they change and how they acquire the power to shape what happens next.