Ossorio: Okay, here's a nice neat one. "In what sense are the maxims status dynamic? Many of them don't seem to be about the logic of place and relation. For example, 'If a person has a reason to do something, he'll do it unless he has a stronger reason not to.'"

These are status dynamic maxims because the background model is the model of an individual's place in the scheme of things, and the fact that behavior potential depends on that, and that the person's behavior expresses that.

Now as far as the particular, "If a person has a reason to do something, he'll do it unless...", you may recall that there is a Relationship Formula that says "If A has a given relation to B, his behavior will express that relation unless..."

The short version of that is that the relations you have give you reasons and provide you opportunities for your behavior. Now, relationships translate into statuses. If you think of this room, you can talk about the relation of any two things and any three things and any four things in it. And that gets very, very complicated. Or you can talk about the place that each single thing has in the room, and that implies all these other relations. So it's a much more compact way of dealing with a whole range of things that you lose track of and may not be able to handle just because there are so many of them, if you try to do it in terms of relations.

If you think that way, reasons depend on relations, and relations are the mirror image of status, you can see why the model of status is behind this maxim.

Like I say, that was a nice, neat one.