A Metamodel for Ontologically Heterogeneous Social Dynamics Part II: Modeling Six Categories of Social Facts
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Social inquiry uses entities, relations, events, attributes, states, and processes to articulate different questions about a common situation. This paper develops their representations within the abstract action framework introduced in Part I, with ontological questions suspended. Each category receives a separate construction, derivation, critique, and philosophical interpretation. Indexed appearances support declared entity-reidentification criteria; incidence relations require invariance under participant identification; occurrence records preserve distinctions lost by idempotent effects; partial attributes require both value and definedness consistency; state descriptions depend on retained observation and memory; and process histories retain ordering, intermediate conditions, and segmentation beyond their composite effect. Established continuation semantics supplies a common state-consistency construction. Further conditional results concern the exact composition of collapse sets, coordination among category records, classification-mediated updates, changes of descriptive regime, finite probabilistic aggregation, and finite-horizon approximation error. A cooperative-agreement model is developed through its complete twelve-map transformation family. A graph model derives collective units and shows how a component description can support edge additions while failing under deletion. The philosophical analysis separates formation, description, and social uptake; predictive sufficiency and historical warrant; and behavioral equivalence and entity identity. A proposed case-study design states the evidence and revision conditions for each representation. The contribution is a coordinated architecture of explicit modeling commitments, with empirical adequacy and broader ontological interpretation remaining open.
DOI: 10.17613/3czj1-7bb97
Author: HUANG, Wanhong
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7212355420
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