China Social Science Review

No.1, 2025

 

 

Dong Da and Chen Wei

 

The basic capacity of human social cognition is continuous with the complexity of the social network in which it is embedded. This means that the social unit constituted by second-person interactions constitutes in itself a strict constraint for defining the connotations of the perspective. The definition of the connotations of the second-person perspective can use the formal analysis of the two most basic social units—the dual and the ternary—in formal sociology. In the first meaning, the second-person perspective is embedded in the duality, and the second-person relation is the pure “I-you relation,” where the object of perception of “I” is only the pure “you,” and the object of perception of “you” is only the pure “I.”