The question
QUESTION-029 asks what constitutes the identity of a communicative act. The record holds two answers that pull apart. CLAIM-115 locates what survives in what “a receiving system can still reconstruct and act upon”, which is internal to the interpreter. CLAIM-151 makes the act partly constituted by relations to participants, norms and uptake, which are external. This question asks whether identity has both factors, how they relate, and which one fidelity tracks.
Why the record needs it
The transfer has a named mechanism. An utterance’s content is fixed by the content of the representations it expresses plus the public-language relations it enters. So a factoring of representational content constrains the factoring of an act’s content. If the act has two factors, CLAIM-115 and CLAIM-151 are not rivals. They describe different factors, and a translation can keep one while losing the other. That is CLAIM-118’s split between interpreter and context made into a split in identity. CLAIM-046 puts observable responses first, and an answer would say which factor those responses measure.
What the record holds
- THEORY-089: content has “a narrow conceptual role inside the head and a referential factor relating it to the world”. Role “determines the nature of the referential factor” without fixing reference. Social meaning sits in the referential factor or in a third, social factor. Block notes that long-arm roles “are better for thinking about translation and communication”. Limit: it is about mental representations, not acts. It gives no identity conditions for roles, and the social factor is not built.
What would answer it
A case where two renderings keep the receiver’s inferential and decision profile but change who is addressed or what uptake is expected. Or the reverse case. With either, a statement of which change the record’s fidelity measures would count as a loss.
Note of 2026-10-12: the restated relational thesis and filed cases
This question paraphrases CLAIM-151 in its version 1 wording, “relations to participants”. PR #121 restated CLAIM-151 at version 2 as relations to “participant roles”, so that “a new audience in the same role keeps the constituent”. Under version 2, a rendering that changes who is addressed within the same role changes no constituent, so the test above would need a change of addressed role to separate the two factors. PR #121 also filed CLAIM-204, a proposed answer to QUESTION-029 that puts relational organization and what receivers can recover in one thesis, in different roles, and CLAIM-223, which reads survival and certification as answers to different parts of one question. Cases of the kind asked for are filed: CASE-064 and CASE-061 hold the token fixed and change the audience, CASE-073 holds a declared intention fixed, and CASE-057 swaps the persons. Whether any of these answers this question is left to the owner.