by Alejandro Cabezas-Cruz

 

The recurrent failure of high-profile public debates to reach durable resolution can be mapped with surprising precision onto a three-part architecture of meaning, inference and authority. I call this the S-L-I triad: Semantics (S) supplies the vocabulary and the operative distinctions; Logic (L) applies accepted rules of validity to whatever the semantic frame has stabilised; Ideology/Power (I) functions as the referee that certifies, ignores or punishes the results. Whoever nails down the key word first—“worship,” “marriage,” “dependence,” “deeds”—gains the initiative because the syllogisms that follow inevitably favour the chosen definition. Conversely, an opponent who prevents semantic closure, either by introducing gradations (“worship₁ / worship₂”) or by showing cross-cultural variability (“Mayan kinship”), disables the formal engines of deduction and probabilistic argument that would otherwise decide the contest.

Yet Logic possesses coercive force only inside the semantic grid that hosts it, and both S and L remain merely private games until some authority—scripture, expert science, constitutional law, revolutionary dignity—ratifies them. That ratification is the Ideology/Power layer: it freezes definitions (“marriage = male + female” by statute), elevates particular inference rules to orthodoxy (“evidence-based medicine”), or denounces them as heresy. Empirically, the order of battle is thus S → L → I: lock the word, run the argument, appeal to the referee.

The triad, however, does not exhaust the dynamics of persuasion because it cannot explain why debates so often rupture even after every technical manoeuvre is exhausted. What intervenes is an appeal to what participants sense as a moral high-ground: a child’s right not to be commodified, the dignity of a small nation, the inviolability of innocent life, the imperative to prevent needless suffering. When one party appears to trample that floor—cheering genocide, dismissing vaccine risks, buying babies—the other party no longer treats the exchange as a contest of premises and conclusions; it switches to moral shaming, exit, or outright coercion. The discourse fractures because, beneath the explicit S-L-I layers, interlocutors rely on what recent work on archewords calls latent universals: preverbal intuitions of Care, Justice, Dignity, Truth. These archewords are the deep grammar that makes any semantic bargaining intelligible in the first place. Once a speaker is perceived to negate the archeword, semantic re-definition is denounced as sophistry and logical validity as cynicism; ideological authority itself loses its halo and reverts to naked force.

History shows that regimes which rely on force alone—Stalinist purges, Khmer Rouge agrarianism, apartheid South Africa—can endure for a time, but they survive only by retrofitting a quasi-moral narrative (racial destiny, Juche self-reliance, revolutionary virtue) and by censoring counter-archewords. As material conditions shift or leadership passes, the cost of policing such narratives rises, information channels degrade, and suppressed archewords re-emerge in underground literature, protest rituals or elite defections. Power then discovers that it must either reconform to the latent moral universals or face dissolution.

For philosophers and social scientists the implication is clear. Analysing debate through the S-L-I triad yields a rigorous account of how definitions, deductions and institutional weight interact, but the deeper stability of any discursive order depends on periodic moral recalibration to the archeword floor. Technical victories—semantic pins, logical checks, legal rulings—remain provisional until they resonate with shared intuitions of care and fairness; without that resonance the conversation tilts toward shaming or violence. A polity that masters definitions, proofs and enforcement yet neglects the substratum of moral universals discovers, sooner or later, that the substratum returns—in revolt, in reform, or in collapse.