{
  "id": "we-the-people.setter",
  "term": "we the people",
  "sense": "setter",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "published",
  "level": 18,
  "domain": "agency",
  "style": "folk",
  "definition": "A collective self that makes its boundary wider to every member and reads them together as the one that sets the walls of its government.",
  "folk_gloss": "the citizens as a whole, named as the source of a government's authority",
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "collective-self.shared",
      "boundary.limit",
      "set.fix",
      "power.over",
      "legitimacy.endorsed",
      "in-group.inside",
      "make.verb",
      "wide.spatial",
      "member.social",
      "read.information",
      "wall.range-end",
      "government.administrative"
    ],
    "interaction": "Widening the boundary to all members and placing the setting of government's walls in that whole turns every member into a part of the setter; the government's power then reads as borrowed from the group.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "the setter and the set named as the same group",
      "power read as lent upward by every member"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The United States Constitution of 1787 opens with the words 'We the People of the United States'.",
      "domain": "politics"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "legitimacy.endorsed",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "legitimacy is walls read as one's own; we the people names the members as the ones who set them"
    },
    {
      "id": "one-nation.whole",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "one nation widens the boundary to join its parts; we the people also names the joined whole as the setter"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "we the people"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "claude-opus-5-5:hand-curated",
    "date": "2026-09-29",
    "confidence": 0.85,
    "sources": [
      "schema/power-agency-phase.md"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-we-the-people.setter"
}