The case
Commentators say the fans hate the owner. There are chants, signs, booing, a boycott call, a hostile tone online. Some supporters defend the owner, many say nothing, and the fanbase has no procedure by which a position becomes its own. Nobody has surveyed it.
What it can show
A2’s four readings of “the fanbase hates the owner”:
- Aggregate. Most fans individually dislike the owner.
- Shared emotional orientation. Disapproval circulates and becomes mutually recognized, the we-mode emotion of THEORY-126.
- Normative position. Opposing the owner is part of being a loyal fan, and defending the owner draws sanction.
- Corporate judgment. An authorized body, such as a supporters’ trust, takes a position, the group judgment of THEORY-127.
A fanbase can show 2 and 3 strongly and never reach 4. A2: the sentence can refer to “a public, distributed pattern of communicative behavior” that forms “a recognizable public stance”, which is not the distribution of private attitudes. Preference falsification, unequal participation and amplification can let a minority fix the stance. A5 §3 judged that the general point, that a collective’s attitude can differ from its members’, is already CLAIM-030 and CLAIM-271, and that what is new is a collective with no procedure for judgment at all, which makes the case a possible boundary for CLAIM-030: a public stance without a collective intention. That is filed as a question, not a claim, as A5 advised.
Given its standing, it cannot show that a majority dislikes anyone, that the stance is stable, or that the fanbase is in an emotional state in Huebner’s stronger sense (THEORY-125). A4’s discriminating variation: measure private attitudes, public expression, perceived norms and media description over time, and test whether a visible minority holds a stance the private majority rejects.