The Subject–Object Relation Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Russell (1960: 767):

James's doctrine of radical empiricism was first published in 1904, in an essay called 'Does "Consciousness" Exist?'.  The main purpose of this essay was to deny that the subject–object relation is fundamental.  It had, until then, been taken for granted by philosophers that there is a kind of occurrence called 'knowing', in which one entity, the knower or subject, is aware of another, the thing known, or the object.  The knower was regarded as a mind or soul; the object known might be a material object, an eternal essence, another mind, or, in self-consciousness, identical with the knower.  Almost everything in accepted philosophy was bound up with the dualism of subject and object.  The distinction of mind and matter, the contemplative ideal, and the traditional notion of 'truth', all need to be radically reconsidered if the distinction of subject and object is not accepted as fundamental.

Blogger Comment:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the subject–object relation is a construal of experience as meaning; that is, both are in the domain of meaning, neither is in the domain outside meaning.  Within meaning, the subject–object relation is, in the first instance, a mental process involving a senser and a phenomenon.

The distinction of mind and matter is the semiotic distinction between the domain of mental (and verbal) processes and the domain of material processes.