Relational Models Theory

Relational Models Theory is a theory in cognitive anthropology positing a biologically

innate set of elementary mental models and a generative computational system operating
upon those models.  The computational system produces compound models, using the
elementary models as a kind of lexicon.  The resulting set of models is used in understanding,
motivating, and evaluating social relationships and social structures.  The elementary models
are intuitively quite simple and commonsensical.  They are as follows: Communal Sharing
(having something in common), Authority Ranking (arrangement into a hierarchy), Equality
Matching (striving to maintain egalitarian relationships), and Market Pricing (use of ratios). 
Even though Relational Models Theory is classified as anthropology, it bears on several
philosophical questions.
It contributes to value theory by describing a mental faculty which plays a crucial role in
generating a plurality of values.  It thus shows how a single human nature can result in
conflicting systems of value.  The theory also contributes to philosophy of cognition.  The
complex models evidently result from a computational operation, thus supporting the view
that a part of the mind functions computationally.  The theory contributes  to metaphysics. 
Formal properties posited by the theory are perhaps best understood abstractly, raising the
possibility that these mental models correspond to abstract objects.  If so, then Relational
Models Theory reveals a Platonist ontology.

Table of Contents
1.The Theory
1.The Elementary Models
2.Resemblance to Classic Measurement Scales
3.Self-Organization and Natural Selection
4.Compound Models
5.Mods and Preos
2.Philosophical Implications
1.Moral Psychology
2.Computational Conceptions of Cognition
3.Platonism
3.References
1.Specifically Addressing Relational Models Theory
2.Related Issues
1. The Theory

a. The Elementary Models

The anthropologist Alan Page Fiske pioneered Relational Models Theory (RMT).  RMT was
originally conceived as a synthesis of certain constructs concerning norms formulated by Max
Weber, Jean Piaget, and Paul Ricoeur.  Fiske then explored the theory among the Moose
people of Burkina Faso in Africa.  He soon realized that its application was far more general,
giving special insight into human nature.  According to RMT, humans are naturally social,
using the relational models to structure and understand social interactions, the application of
these models seen as intrinsically valuable. All relational models, no matter how complex, are,
according to RMT, analyzable by four elementary models: Communal Sharing, Authority
Ranking, Equality Matching, Market Pricing.
Any relationship informed by Communal Sharing presupposes a bounded group, the members
of which are not differentiated from each other.  Distinguishing individual identities are
socially irrelevant.  Generosity within a Communal Sharing group is not usually conceived of
as altruism due to this shared identity, even though there is typically much behavior which
otherwise would seem like extreme altruism.  Members of a Communal Sharing relationship
typically feel that they share something in common, such as blood, deep attraction, national
identity, a history of suffering, or the joy of food.  Examples include nationalism, racism,
intense romantic love, indiscriminately killing any member of an enemy group in retaliation
for the death of someone in one’s own group, sharing a meal.

An Authority Ranking relationship is a hierarchy in which individuals or groups are placed in

relative higher or  lower relations .  Those ranked higher have prestige and privilege not
enjoyed by those who are lower.  Further, the higher typically have some control over the
actions of those who are lower.  However, the higher also have duties of protection and
pastoral care for those beneath them.  Metaphors of spatial relation, temporal relation, and
magnitude are typically used to distinguish people of different rank. For example, a King
having a larger audience room than a Prince, or a King arriving after a Prince for a royal
banquet.  Further examples include military rankings, the authority of parents over their
children especially in more traditional societies, caste systems, and God’s authority over
humankind.  Brute coercive manipulation is not considered to be Authority Ranking; it is
more properly categorized as the Null Relation in which people treat each other in non-social
ways.

In Equality Matching, one attempts to achieve and sustain an even balance and one-to-one
correspondence between individuals or groups.  When there is not a perfect balance, people
try to keep track of the degree of imbalance in order to calculate how much correction is
needed.  “Equality matching is like using a pan balance: People know how to assemble actions
on one side to equal any given weight on the other side” (Fiske 1992, 691).  If you and I are out
of balance, we know what would restore equality.  Examples include the principle of one-
person/one-vote, rotating credit associations, equal starting points in a race, taking turns
offering dinner invitations, and giving an equal number of minutes to each candidate to
deliver an on-air speech.

Market Pricing is the application of ratios to social interaction.  This can involve maximization
or minimization as in trying to maximize profit or minimize loss.  But it can also involve
arriving at an intuitively fair proportion, as in a judge deciding on a punishment proportional
to a crime.  In Market Pricing, all socially relevant properties of a relationship are reduced to a
single measure of value, such as money or pleasure.  Most utilitarian principles involve
maximization.  An exception would be Negative Utilitarianism whose principle is the
minimization of suffering.  But all utilitarian principles are applications of Market Pricing,
since the maximum and the minimum are both proportions.  Other examples include rents,
taxes, cost-benefit analyses including military estimates of kill ratios and proportions of
fighter planes potentially lost, tithing, and prostitution.
RMT has been extensively corroborated by controlled studies based on research using a great
variety of methods investigating diverse phenomena, including cross-cultural studies (Haslam
2004b).  The research shows that the elementary models play an important role in cognition
including perception of other persons.

b. Resemblance to Classic Measurement Scales

It may be jarring to learn that intense romantic love and racism are both categorized as
Communal Sharing or that tithing and prostitution are both instances of Market Pricing. 
These examples illustrate that a relational model is, at its core, a meaningless formal
structure.  Implementation in interpersonal relations and attendant emotional associations
enter in on a different level of mental processing.  Each model can be individuated in purely
formal terms, each elementary model strongly resembling one of the classic scale types
familiar from measurement theory.  (Strictly speaking, it is each mod which can be
individuated in purely formal terms.  This finer point will be discussed in the next section.)
Communal Sharing resembles a nominal (categorical) scale.  A nominal scale is simply
classifying things into categories.  A questionnaire may be designed to categorize people as
theist, atheist, agnostic, and other.  Such a questionnaire is measuring religious belief by using
a nominal scale.  The groups into which Communal Sharing sorts people is similar.  One
either belongs to a pertinent group or one does not, there being no degree or any shades of
gray.  Another illustration of nominal scaling is the pass/fail system of grading.  Authority
Ranking resembles an ordinal scale in which items are ranked.  The ranking of students
according to their performance is one example.  The ordered classification of shirts in a store
as small, medium, large, and extra large is another.  Equality Matching resembles an interval
scale.  On interval scales , any unit measures the same magnitude on any point in the scale. 
For example, on the Celsius scale the difference between 1 degree and 2 degrees is the same as
the difference between 5 degrees and 6 degrees.  Equality Matching resembles an interval
scale insofar as one can measure the degree of inequality in a social relationship using equal
intervals so as to judge how to correct the imbalance.  It is by use of such a scale that people in
an Equality Matching interaction can specify how much one person owes another.  However,
an interval scale cannot be used to express a ratio because it has no absolute zero point.  For
example, the zero point on the Celsius scale is not absolute so one cannot say that 20 degrees
is twice as warm as 10 degrees while on a Kelvin scale because the zero point is absolute one
can express ratios.  Given that Market Pricing is the application of ratios to social interactions,
it resembles a ratio scale such as the Kelvin scale.  One cannot, for example, meaningfully
speak of the maximization of utility without presupposing some sort of ratio scale for
measuring utility.  Maximization would correspond to 100 percent.

c. Self-Organization and Natural Selection

The four measurement scales correspond to different levels of semantic richness and
precision.  The nominal scale conveys little information, being very coarse grained.  For
example, pass/fail grading conveys less information than ranking students.  Giving letter
grades is even more precise and semantically rich, conveying how much one student out-
performs another.  This is the use of an interval scale.  The most informative and semantically
rich is a percentage grade which illustrates the ratio by which one student out-performs
another, hence a ratio scale.  For example, if graded accurately a student scoring 90 percent
has done twice as well as a student scoring 45 percent.  Counterexamples may be apparent:
two students could be ranked differently while receiving the same letter grade by using a
deliberately coarse-grained letter grading system so as to minimize low grades.  To take an
extreme case, a very generous instructor might award an A to every student (after all, no
student was completely lost in class) while at the same time mentally ranking the students in
terms of their performance.  Split grades are sometimes used to smooth out the traditional
coarse-grained letter grading system .  But, if both scales are as sensitive as possible and based
on the same data, the interval scale will convey more information than the ordinal scale.  The
ordinal ranking will be derivable from the interval grading, but not vice versa.  This is more
obvious in the case of temperature measurement, in which grade inflation is not an issue. 
Simply ranking objects in terms of warmer/colder conveys less information than does Celsius
measurement.

One scale is more informative than another because it is less symmetrical; greater asymmetry
means that more information is conveyed.  On a measurement scale, a permutation which
distorts or changes information is an asymmetry.  Analogously, a permutation in a social-
relational arrangement which distorts or changes social relations is an asymmetry.  In either
case, a permutation which does not carry with it such a distortion or change is symmetric. 
The nominal scale type is the most symmetrical scale type, just as Communal Sharing is the
most symmetrical elementary model.  In either case, the only asymmetrical permutation is
one which moves an item out of a category, for example, expelling someone from the social
group.  Any permutation within the category or group makes no difference; no difference to
the information conveyed, no difference to the social relation.  In the case of pass/fail grading,
the student’s performance could be markedly different from what it actually was.  So long as
the student does well enough to pass (or poorly enough to fail), this would not have changed
the grade.  Thanks to this high degree of symmetry, the nominal scale conveys relatively little
information.

The ordinal scale is less symmetrical.  Any permutation that changes rankings is
asymmetrical, since it distorts or changes something significant.  But items arranged could
change in many respects relative to each other while their ordering remains unaffected, so a
high level of symmetry remains.  Students could vary in their performance, but so long as
their relative ranking remains the same, this would make no difference to grades based on an
ordinal scale.

An interval scale is even less symmetrical and hence more informative, as seen in the fact that
a system of letter grades conveys more information than does a mere ranking of students.  An
interval scale conveys the relative degrees of difference between items.  If one student
improves from doing C level work to B level work, this would register on an interval scale but
would remain invisible on an ordinal scale if the change did not affect student ranking.  
Analogously, in Equality Matching, if one person, and one person only, were to receive an
extra five minutes to deliver their campaign speech, this would be socially significant.  By
contrast, in Authority Ranking, the addition of an extra five minutes to the time taken by a
Prince to deliver a speech would make no socially significant difference provided that the
relative ranking remains undisturbed (for example, the King still being allotted more time
than the Prince, and the Duke less than the Prince).

In Market Pricing, as in any ratio scale, the asymmetry is even greater.  Adding five years to
the punishment of every convict could badly skew what should be proportionate
punishments.  But giving an extra five minutes to each candidate would preserve balance in
Equality Matching.

The symmetries of all the scale types have an interesting formal property.  They form a
descending symmetry subgroup chain.  In other words, the symmetries of a ratio scale form a
subset of the symmetries of a relevant interval scale, the symmetries of that scale form a
subset of the symmetries of a relevant ordinal scale, and the symmetries of that scale form a
subset of the symmetries of a relevant nominal scale.  More specifically, the scale types form a
containment hierarchy.  Analogously, the symmetries of Market Pricing form a subset of the
symmetries of Equality Matching which form a subset of the symmetries of Authority Ranking
which form a subset of the symmetries of Communal Sharing.  Descending subgroup chains
are common in nature, including inorganic nature.  The symmetries of solid matter form a
subset of the symmetries of liquid matter which form a subset of the symmetries of gaseous
matter which form a subset of the symmetries of plasma.

This raises interesting questions about the origins of these patterns in the mind: could they
result from spontaneous symmetry breakings in brain activity rather than being genetically
encoded?  Darwinian adaptations are genetically encoded, whereas spontaneous symmetry
breaking is ubiquitous in nature rather than being limited to genetically constrained
structures.  The appeal to spontaneous symmetry breaking suggests a non-Darwinian
approach to understanding how the elementary models could be “innate” (in the sense of
being neither learned nor arrived at through reason).  That is, are the elementary relational
models results of self-organization rather than learning or natural selection?  If they are
programmed into the genome, why would this programming imitate a pattern in nature which
usually occurs without genetic encoding?  The spiral shape of a galaxy, for example, is due to
spontaneous symmetry breaking, as is the transition from liquid to solid.  But these
transitions are not encoded in genes, of course.  Being part of the natural world, why should
the elementary models be understood any differently?

d. Compound Models
While all relational models are analyzable into four fundamental models, the number of
models as such is potentially infinite.  This is because social-relational cognition is productive;
any instance of a model can serve as a constituent in an even more complex instance of a
model.  Consider Authority Ranking and Market Pricing; an instance of one can be embedded
in or subordinated to an instance of the other.  When a judge decides on a punishment that is
proportionate to the crime, the judge is using a ratio scale and hence Market Pricing.  But the
judge is only authorized to do this because of her authority, hence Authority Ranking.  We
have here a case of Market Pricing embedded in a superordinate (as opposed to subordinate)
structure of Authority Ranking resulting in a compound model.  Now consider ordering food
from a waiter.  The superordinate relationship is now Market Pricing, since one is paying for
the waiter’s service.  But the service itself is Authority Ranking with the customer as the
superior party.  In this case, an instance of Authority Ranking is subordinate to an instance of
Market Pricing.  This is also a compound model with the same constituents but differently
arranged.  The democratic election of a leader is Authority Ranking subordinated to Equality
Matching.  An elementary school teacher’s supervising children to make sure they take turns
is Equality Matching subordinated to Authority Ranking.

A model can also be embedded in a model of the same type.  In some complex egalitarian
social arrangements, one instance of Equality Matching can be embedded in another.  Anton
Pannekoek’s proposed Council Communism is one such example.  The buying and selling of
options is the buying and selling of the right to buy and sell, hence recursively embedded
Market Pricing.  Moose society is largely structured by a complex model involving multiple
levels of Communal Sharing.  A family among the Moose is largely structured by Communal
Sharing, as is the village which embeds it, as is the larger community that embeds the village,
and so on.  In principle, there is no upper limit on the number of embeddings in a compound
model.  Hence, the number of potential relational models is infinite.

e. Mods and Preos

A model, whether elementary or compound, is devoid of meaning when considered in
isolation.  As purely abstract structures, models are sometimes known as “mods” , which is an
abbreviation of, “cognitively modular but modifiable modes of interacting” (Fiske 2004, 3). 
(This may be a misnomer, since, as purely formal structures devoid of semantic content, mods
are not modes of social interaction any more than syntax.   is a communication system.)  In
order to externalize models, that is, in order to use them to interpret or motivate or structure
interactions, one needs “preos,” these being “socially transmitted prototypes, precedents, and
principles that complete the mods, specifying how, when and with respect to whom the mods
apply” (2004, 4).  Strictly speaking, a relational model is the union of a mod with a preo.   A
mod has the formal properties of symmetry, asymmetry, and in some cases embeddedness. 
But a mod requires a preo in order to have the properties intuitively identifiable as
meaningful, such as social application, emotional resonance, and motivating force.

The notion of a preo updates and includes the notion of an implementation rule, from an
earlier stage of relational-models theorizing.  Fiske has identified five kinds of
implementation rules (1991, 142).  One kind specifies the domain to which a model applies. 
For example, in some cultures Authority Ranking is used to structure and give meaning to
marriage.  In other cultures, Authority Ranking does not structure marriage and may even be
viewed as immoral in that context.  Another sort of implementation rule specifies the
individuals or groups which are to be related by the model.  Communal Sharing, for example,
can be applied to different groups of people.  Experience, and sometimes also agreement,
decides who is in the Communal Sharing group.  In implementing Authority Ranking, it is not
enough to specify how many ranks there are.  One must also specify who belongs to which
rank.  A third sort of implementation rule defines values and categories.  In Equality
Matching, each participant must give or receive the same thing.  But what counts as the same
thing?  In Authority Ranking, a higher-up deserves honor from a lower-down, but what counts
as honor and what constitutes showing honor?  There are no a priori or innate answers to
these questions; culture and mutual agreement help settle such matters.  Consider the
principle of one-person/one-vote, an example of Equality Matching.  Currently in the United
States and Great Britain, whoever gets the most votes wins the election.  But it is also possible
to have a system in which a two-thirds majority is necessary for there to be a winner.  Without
a two-thirds majority, there may be a coalition government, a second election with the lowest
performing candidates eliminated, or some other arrangement.  These are different ways of
determining what counts as treating each citizen as having an equal say.  A fourth determines
the code used to indicate the existence and quality of the relationship.  Authority Ranking is
coded differently in different cultures, as it can be represented by the size of one’s office, the
height of one’s throne, the number of bars on one’s sleeve, and so forth.  A fifth sort of
implementation rule concerns a general tendency to favor some elementary models over
others.  For example, Market Pricing may be highly valued in some cultures as fair and
reasonable while categorized as dehumanizing in others.  The same is clearly true of Authority
Ranking.  Communal Sharing is much more prominent and generally valued in some cultures
than in others.  This does not mean that any culture is completely devoid of any specific
elementary model but that some models are de-emphasized and marginalized in some
cultures as compared to others.  So the union of mod and preo may even serve to marginalize
the resulting model in relation to other models.

The fact that the same mod can be united with different preos is one source of normative
plurality across cultures, to be discussed in the next section.  Another source is the generation
of distinct compound mods.  Different cultures can use different mods, since there is a
considerable number of potential mods to choose from.

2. Philosophical Implications

a. Moral Psychology
Each elementary model crucially enters into certain moral values.  An ethic of service to one’s
group is a form of Communal Sharing.  It is an altruistic ethic in some sense, but bear in mind
that all members of the group share a common identity.  So, strictly speaking, it is not true
altruism.  Authority Ranking informs an ethic of obedience to authority including respect,
honor, and loyalty.  Any questions of value remaining to be clarified are settled by the
authority; subordinates are expected to follow the values thus dictated.  Fairness and even
distribution are informed by Equality Matching.  John Rawls’ veil of ignorance exemplifies
Equality Matching; a perspective in which one does not know which role one will play
guarantees that one aim for equality.  Gregory Vlastos has even attempted to reduce all
distributive justice to a framework that can be identified with Equality Matching.  Market
Pricing informs libertarian values of freely entering into contracts and taking risks with the
aim of increasing one’s own utility or the utility of one’s group.  But this also includes
suffering the losses when one’s calculations prove incorrect.  Utilitarianism is a somewhat
counterintuitive attempt to extend this sort of morality to all sentient life, but is still
recognizable as Market Pricing.  It would be too simple, however, to say that there are only
four sorts of values in RMT.  In fact, combinations of models yield complex models, resulting
in a potential infinity of complex values.  Potential variety is further increased by the
variability of possible preos.  This great variety of values leads to value conflicts most
noticeably across cultures.
RMT strongly suggests value pluralism, in Isaiah Berlin’s sense of “pluralism”.  The pluralism
in question is a cultural pluralism, different traditions producing mutually incommensurable
values.  Berlin drew a distinction between relativism and pluralism, even though there are
strong similarities between the two.  Relativism and pluralism both acknowledge values which
are incommensurable, meaning that they cannot be reconciled and that there is no absolute or
objective way to judge between them.  Pluralism, however, acknowledges empathy and
emotional understanding across cultures.  Even if one does not accept the values of another
culture, one still has an emotional understanding of how such values could be adopted.  This
stands in contrast to relativism, as defined by Berlin.  If relativism is true, then there can be
no emotional understanding of alien values.  One understands the value system of an alien
culture in essentially the same manner as one understands the behavior of ants or, for that
matter, the behavior of tectonic plates; it is a purely causal understanding.  It is the
emotionally remote understanding of the scientist rather than the empathic understanding of
someone engaging, say, with the poetry and theatre of another culture.  Adopting RMT,
pluralism seems quite plausible.  Given that one has the mental capacity to generate the
relevant model, one can replicate the alien value in oneself.  One is not simply thinking about
the foreigner’s relational model, but using one’s shared human nature to produce that same
model in oneself.  This does not, however, mean that one adopts that value, since one can also
retain the conflicting model characteristic of one’s own culture.  One’s decisive motivation
may still flow wholly from the latter.

But the significance of RMT for the debate over pluralism and absolutism may be more
complex than indicated above.  Since RMT incorporates the view that people perceive social
relationships as intrinsic values, this may indicate that a society which fosters interactions and
relationships is absolutely better than one which divides and atomizes, at least along that one
dimension.  This may be an element of moral absolutism in RMT, and it is interesting to see
how it is to be reconciled with any pluralism also implied.

b. Computational Conceptions of Cognition

The examples of embedding in Section 1.d. not only illustrate the productivity of social-
relational cognition, but also its systematicity.  To speak of the systematicity of thought means
that the ability to think a given thought renders probable the ability to think a semantically
close thought.  The ability to conceive of Authority Ranking embedding Market Pricing makes
it highly likely that one can conceive of Market Pricing embedding Authority Ranking.  One
finds productivity and systematicity in language as well.  Any phrase can be embedded in a
superordinate phrase.  For example, the determiner phrase [the water] is embedded in the
prepositional phrase [in  [the water]], and the prepositional phrase [in [the water]] is embedded
in the determiner phrase [the fish [in [the water]]].  The in-principle absence of limit here
means that the number of phrases is infinite.  Further, the ability to parse (or understand) a
phrase renders very probable the ability to parse (or understand) a semantically close phrase.  
For example, being able to mentally process Plato did trust Socrates makes it likely that one can
process Socrates did trust Plato as well as Plato did trust Plato and Socrates did trust Socrates. 
Productivity and systematicity, either in language or in social-relational cognition, constitute a
strong inductive argument for a combinatorial operation that respects semantic relations. 
(The operation respects semantic relations, given that the meaning of a generated compound
is a function of the meanings of its constituents and their arrangement.)  In other words, it is
an argument for digital computation.
This is essentially Noam Chomsky’s argument for a computational procedure explaining
syntax (insofar as syntax is not idiomatic).  It is also essentially Jerry Fodor’s argument for
computational procedures constituting thought processes more generally.  That digital
computation underlies both complex social-relational cognition and language raises
important questions.  Are all mental processes largely computational or might language and
social-relational cognition be special cases?  Do language and social-relational cognition share
the same computational mechanism or do they each have their own?  What are the constraints
on computation in either language or social-relational cognition?

c. Platonism
Chomsky has noted the discrete infinity of language.  Each phrase consists of a number of
constituents which can be counted using natural numbers (discreteness), and there is no
longest phrase meaning that the set of all possible phrases is infinite.  Analogous points apply
to social-relational cognition.  The number of instances of an elementary mod within any mod
can be counted using natural numbers.  In the case discussed earlier in which a customer is
ordering food from a waiter, there is one instance of Authority Ranking embedded in one
instance of Market Pricing.  The total number of instances is two, a natural number.  There is
no principled upper limit on the number of embeddings, hence infinity.  The discrete infinity
of language and social-relational cognition is tantamount to their productivity.

However, some philosophers, especially Jerrold Katz, have argued that nothing empirical can
exhibit discrete infinity.  Something empirical may be continuously infinite, such as a volume
of space containing infinitely many points.  But the indefinite addition of constituent upon
constituent has no empirical exemplification.  Space-time, if it were finite in this sense, would
contain only finite energy and a finite number of particles.  There are not infinitely many
objects, as discrete infinity would imply.  On this reasoning, the discrete infinity of an entity
can only mean that the entity exists beyond space and time, still assuming that space-time is
finite.  This would mean that sentences, and by similar reasoning compound mods as well, are
abstract objects rather than neural features or processes.  This would mean that mods and
sentences are abstract objects like numbers.  One finds here a kind of Platonism, Platonism
here defined as the view that there are abstract objects.
As a tentative reply, one could say that the symbols generated by a computational system are
potentially infinite in number, but this raises questions about the nature of potentiality.  What
is a merely potential mod or a merely potential sentence?  It is not something with any
spatiotemporal location or any causal power.  Perhaps it is sentence types (as contrasted with
tokens) that exhibit discrete infinity.  And likewise with mods, it is mod types that exhibit
discrete infinity.  But here too, one is appealing to entities, namely types, that have no
spatiotemporal location or causal power.  By definition, these are abstract objects.

The case for Platonism is perhaps stronger for compound mods, but one could also defend the
same conclusion with regard to the elementary mods.  Each elementary mod, as noted earlier,
corresponds to one of the classic measurement scales.  Different scale types are presupposed
by different logics.  Classical two-valued logic presupposes a nominal scale, as illustrated by
the law of excluded middle: a statement is either on the truth scale, in which case it is true, or
off the scale, in which case it is false.  Alternatively, one could posit two categories, one for
true and one for false, and stipulate that any statement belongs on one scale or the other. 
Fuzzy logics conceive truth either in terms of interval scales, for example, it is two degrees
more true that Michel is bald than that Van is bald, or in terms of ratio scales, for example, it
is 80 percent true that Van is bald, 100 percent true that Michel is bald.  Even though it has
perhaps not been formalized, there is intuitively a logic which presupposes an ordinal scale.  A
logic, say,  in which it is more true that chess is a game than that Ring a Ring o’ Roses is a
game, even though it would be meaningless to ask how much more.  If nominal, ordinal,
interval, and ratio scales are more basic than various logics, then the question arises as to
whether they can seriously be considered empirical or spatiotemporal.  If anything is Platonic,
then something more basic than logic is likely to be Platonic.  And what is an elementary mod
aside from the scale type which it “resembles”?  Is there any reason to distinguish the
elementary mod from the scale type itself?  If not, then the elementary mods themselves are
abstract objects, at least on this argument.

Does reflection upon language and the relational models support a Platonist metaphysic?  If
so, what is one to make of the earlier discussion of RMT appealing, as it did, to neural
symmetry breakings and mental computations?  If mods are abstract objects, then the
symmetry breakings and computations may belong to the epistemology of RMT rather than to
its metaphysics.  In other words, they may throw light on how one knows about mods rather
than actually constituting the mods themselves.  Specifically, the symmetry breaking and
computations may account for the production of mental representations of mods rather than
the mods themselves.  But whether or not there is a good case here for Platonism is, no doubt,
open to further questioning.
 3. References

a. Specifically Addressing Relational Models Theory

• Bolender, John. (2010), The Self-Organizing Social Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).
• Argues that the elementary relational models are due to self-organizing brain activity.   Also contains a discussion of
possible Platonist implications of RMT.
• Bolender, John. (2011), Digital Social Mind (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic).
• Argues that complex relational models are due to mental computations.
• Fiske, Alan Page. (1990), “Relativity within Moose (‘Mossi’) culture: four incommensurable
models for social relationships,” Ethos, 18, pp. 180-204.
• Fiske here argues that RMT supports moral relativism, although his “relativism” may be the same as Berlin’s
“pluralism.”
• Fiske, Alan Page. (1991), Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations (New
York: The Free Press).
• The classic work on RMT, containing the first full statement of the theory and a wealth of anthropological
illustrations.
• Fiske, Alan Page. (1992), “The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified
Theory of Social Relations,” Psychological Review, 99, 689-723.
• Essentially, a shorter version of Fiske’s (1991).  Nonetheless, this is a detailed and substantial introduction to RMT.
• Fiske, Alan Page. (2004), “Relational Models Theory 2.0,” in Haslam (2004a).
• An updated introduction to RMT.
• Haslam, Nick. ed. (2004a), Relational Models Theory: A Contemporary Overview  (Mahwah, New Jersey
and London: Lawrence Erlbaum).
• An anthology containing an updated introduction to RMT as well as discussions of controlled empirical evidence
supporting the theory.
• Haslam, Nick. ed. (2004b), “Research on the Relational Models: An Overview,” in Haslam
(2004a).
• Reviews controlled studies corroborating that the elementary relational models play an important role in cognition
including person perception.
• Pinker, Steven. (2007), The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature  (London: Allen
Lane).
• Argues that Market Pricing, in contrast to the other three elementary models, is not innate and is somehow
unnatural.

b. Related Issues
• Berlin, Isaiah. (1990), The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. Edited by H.
Hardy (London: Pimlico).
• A discussion of value pluralism in the context of history of ideas.
• Fodor, Jerry A. (1987), Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of  Mind (Cambridge,
Mass. and London: MIT Press).
• The Appendix argues that systematicity and productivity in thought require a combinatorial system.  The point,
however, is a general one, not specifically focused on social-relational cognition.
• Katz, Jerrold J. (1996), “The unfinished Chomskyan revolution,” Mind & Language,  11 (3), pp. 270-
294.
• Argues that only an abstract object can exhibit discrete infinity.
• Rawls, John. (1971), A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
 • The veil of ignorance illustrates Equality Matching.
• Szpiro, George G. (2010), Numbers Rule: The Vexing Mathematics of Democracy, from  Plato to the
Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
• Illustrates various ways in which Equality Matching can be implemented.
• Stevens, S. S. (1946), “On the Theory of Scales of Measurement,” Science 103, pp. 677-680.
• A classic discussion of the types of measurement scales.
• Vlastos, Gregory. (1962), “Justice and Equality,” in Richard B. Brandt, ed. Social
Justice (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall).
• An attempt to understand all distributive justice in terms of Equality Matching.

Author Information
John Bolender
Email: bolender@metu.edu.tr
Middle East Technical University
Turkey

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