Realist Epistemology Vs Systemic Functional Linguistics

Gribbin (1989: xv):

This concern with the ultimate nature of reality is the first of three great roots of metaphysics.  The metaphysician is concerned to know just how accurate a picture of the real world our sense impressions provide.  Our senses respond to impressions they receive from the world outside, and our brains interpret those sense impressions as indicating, perhaps, that there is a tree in the garden.  But the only things that my brain can have direct knowledge of are sense impressions; all my "knowledge" about trees is secondhand, filtered through my senses and into my brain.  So which is more real — the sense impressions or the trees?

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The epistemological assumption here is that meaning is transcendent of semiotic systems, rather than immanent within them.  It is the view that there is one true labelled reality that is filtered through senses into an interpreting brain, and that it the task of science to discover the true labels.  This is the assumption on which the notion of an eventual end of science is based.  It is an assumption rejected by the model of brain function of Gerald Edelman, and one which, as this blog argues, is falsified by the experimental findings of quantum physics.

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, all meanings are immanent within semiotic systems, and all ideational meanings are construals of experience.  In this view, the distinction between a real thing labelled 'tree' and 'knowledge' of a tree is a false distinction.  It is through mental and verbal processes that the meaning 'tree' is construed of experience.