The Thoughts Of Marx In Systemic Functional Linguistics [1]

Russell (1960: 749):

[Marx] called himself a materialist, but not of the eighteenth century sort.  His sort, which, under Hegelian influence, he called 'dialectical', differed in an important way from traditional materialism, and was more akin to what is now called instrumentalism. The older materialism, he said, mistakenly regarded sensation as passive, and thus attributed activity primarily to the object.  In Marx's view, all sensation or perception is an interaction between subject and object; the bare object, apart from the activity of the percipient, is a mere raw material, which is transformed in the process of becoming known.  Knowledge in the old sense of passive contemplation is an unreal abstraction; the process that really takes place is one of handling things.

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Marx's 'activity' interpretation of perception, as the interaction of subject and object, has been imported into Systemic Functional Linguistic theory as the view that the impact of the environment is (actively) construed as meaning — an epistemological view that also follows from the theory of experience embodied in the grammatics.

The 'activity' interpretation of perceptual categorisation can also be seen in neuroscience, in Gerald Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection.  Here the impact of the environment on sensory detectors selects some active neuronal groups over others, differentially probabilised by the activity of inherited 'value' systems, with different impacts selecting different groups, resulting in different categorisations of perceptual experience.  Presumably the intellectual source, in this case, is the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, rather than the dialectical materialism of Marx.