It seems that there is a tendency for discourses primarily operating at Level 1 to devolve into Level 2, and from Level 2 to Level 3, and from Level 3 to Level 4.
It seems maybe you don’t see the Level 2 to Level 3 connection. Well, here’s what I was thinking:
In discourses that are at level 1, people aren’t really forming into stable teams. Think: A bunch of students trying to solve a math problem sheet together, proposing and rejecting various lemmas or intuition pumps. But once the discourse is heavily at level 2, with lots of people thinking hard about how to convince other people of things—with lots of people arguing about some local thing like whether this particular intuition pump is reasonable by thinking about less-local things like whether it would support or undermine Lemma X and thereby support or undermine the strategy so-and-so has been undertaking—well, now it seems like conditions are ripe for teams to start to form. For people to be Team So-And-So’s Strategy. And with the formation of teams comes reporting which team you are on (level 3) and then eventually strategically signalling or shaping perceptions of which team you are on (level 4).
I didn’t elaborate, but I did say:
It seems maybe you don’t see the Level 2 to Level 3 connection. Well, here’s what I was thinking:
In discourses that are at level 1, people aren’t really forming into stable teams. Think: A bunch of students trying to solve a math problem sheet together, proposing and rejecting various lemmas or intuition pumps. But once the discourse is heavily at level 2, with lots of people thinking hard about how to convince other people of things—with lots of people arguing about some local thing like whether this particular intuition pump is reasonable by thinking about less-local things like whether it would support or undermine Lemma X and thereby support or undermine the strategy so-and-so has been undertaking—well, now it seems like conditions are ripe for teams to start to form. For people to be Team So-And-So’s Strategy. And with the formation of teams comes reporting which team you are on (level 3) and then eventually strategically signalling or shaping perceptions of which team you are on (level 4).