An Operational Semantics for Situated Ideological Systems, with a Case Study Concerning a Paradigmatic Religious Conflict

Abstract

This paper introduces an operational semantics for what, in previous work, we have called situated ideological systems: sets of ways to envisage concrete social situations (normatively, valuationally etc.) that individuals and social groups may use to direct their choices and actions in such situations. The agent-based social model that we call Agent Society is used to computationally construe possible social situations where individual agents and groups of agents may find themselves, and to formally represent ideological systems in ways they can collectively share. As a case study of the proposed semantics, the paper formally presents the ideological dynamics underlying the temporal evolution of a paradigmatic situation of religious conflict (between catholics and devotees of African-Brazilian cults), as pictured in the classical Brazilian theatrical play The Keeper of Promises (O Pagador de Promessas). The ideology modeling language TinyIML is used for the computational presentation of the various stages of that ideological dynamics. The syntax and semantics of TinyIML is summarized in an appendix.