The Subjectivist Thoughts Of British Empiricists Vs Systemic Functional Linguistics

Russell (1961):

Philosophy in the eighteenth century was dominated by the British empiricists, of whom Locke, Berkeley, and Hume may be taken as their representatives. … But while their temper was social, their theoretical philosophy led to subjectivism.  This was not a new tendency; it had existed in late antiquity, most emphatically in St Augustine; it was revived in modern times by Descartes' cogito, and reached a momentary culmination in Leibniz's windowless monads.

Blogger Comment:

The subjectivism of the British empiricists contrasts with the 'intersubjectivism' at the heart of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory.  Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 2):

This perspective leads us to place less emphasis on the individual than would be typical of a cognitivist approach; unlike thinking and knowing, at least as these are traditionally conceived, meaning is a social, intersubjective process. If experience is interpreted as meaning, its construal becomes an act of collaboration, sometimes of conflict, and always of negotiation.