Descartes' "Solipsism" Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 34-5):

Descartes' conclusion that there was a thinking substance radically sidestepped biology, along with the rest of the materially based order. Given his remarkable forays into biology, this is surprising. One matter Descartes did not explicitly analyse, however was that to be aware and able to guide his philosophical thought, he needed to have language. And for a person to have language, at least one other person must be involved, even if that person is the memory of someone in one's past, an interiorised interlocutor. This requirement shakes Descartes' notion that his conclusions depended on himself alone and not on other people.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, thinking is not a substance but a mental process that unfolds through a medium, a senser.  Philosophical thoughts are the meanings of language — made possible by the wordings of language — projected by mental processes that unfold through a senser.

Language itself is a social semiotic system that is developed in each individual through social interaction, a development that corresponds to the development of higher-order consciousness, the ability to construe experience as (linguistic) meaning, and the interpersonal construction of the self.

The World As Unlabelled Place Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 28, 29):

But in reality, the world, with its "objects," is an unlabelled place; the number of ways in which macroscopic boundaries in an animal's environment can be partitioned by that animal into objects is very large, if not infinite. Any assignment of boundaries made by an animal is relative, not absolute, and depends on its adaptive or intended needs. 

What is striking is that the ability to partition "objects" and their arrangements depends on the functioning of the maps that we discussed earlier. …

At the same time, the theory must account for object definition and generalisation made on a world whose events and "objects" are not prelabelled by any a priori scheme or top-down order.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, meaning is immanent within semiotic systems, not transcendent of them.  Any object is a construal of experience as first-order meaning (material phenomena).

Importantly, without the correlation of ideational meaning with perceptual discriminations, there can be no construal of experience as labelled objects, merely the construal of experience as nameless patterns (like those of a Jackson Pollock painting).

Receptor Sheets To Brain Sheets Mappings Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 19):

Neurones can be anatomically arranged in many ways and are sometimes disposed into maps. Mapping is an important principle in complex brains. Maps relate points on the two-dimensional receptor sheets of the body (such as the skin or the retina of the eye) to corresponding points on the sheets making up the brain. Receptor sheets (for example, touch cells on your fingertips and retinal cells that respond to light) are able to react to the three-dimensional world and provide the brain with spatial signals about pressure or wavelength differences (they react to a four dimensional world if we consider time as well). Furthermore, maps of the brain connect with each other via fibres that are the most numerous of all those in the brain.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the mappings between points on receptor sheets and corresponding points on sheets in the brain provide the material means of construing experience as perceptual meaning.

Mappings between these and other sheets in the brain provide the material means of mapping perceptual meanings to the meanings of other semiotic systems, most importantly, those of language.

For humans, the meanings of visual experience are correlated with those of language, yielding a different construal of visual experience from those of other species.

Mind–Brain Dualism Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 11-2):

Dualism has persisted in various forms to the present day. For example, while apparently monistic, behaviourism is simply dualism reduced by denial of the mind as a scientific object, and therefore left with one end hanging. Behaviourists solve the dilemma by examining behaviour and ignoring intentionality. They do not attempt to put the mind back into nature; they simply deny its validity as a scientific object. And many nonbehaviouristic psychologists, while asserting that they are materialists and not substance dualists, are nonetheless property dualists. While conceding that the mind and the brain arose from a single substance, they insist that psychological properties must be dealt with exclusively in their own terms, which necessarily differ from those used for the physical objects or bodies giving rise to these properties. A good example of a property dualist is Sigmund Freud in his later years.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the distinction between the mind and the physical object (embodied brain) that gives rise to the mind is the distinction between different domains of experience.

Construals of the mind are concerned with what Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 131) call the 'conscious-semiotic centre of the ideational universe'; that is, the symbolic processing — (internal) mental and (external) verbal — that creates content: meaning and wording.

Construals of the embodied brain are concerned with the outer domain of 'the ideational universe', with its complementary perspectives of (active) material processes and (inert) relational processes.

Descartes' Res Extensa And Res Cogitans Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 11):

It is here that the second great figure of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, Descartes, comes to the fore. In his search for a method of thought, he was led to declare for "substance dualism." As I mentioned earlier, according to this view the world consisted of res extensa (extended things) and res cogitans (thinking things). Galilean manipulations work on res extensa, the set of extended things. But res cogitans, the set of thinking things, does not exist properly in time and space; lacking location, not being an extended thing, it cannot fall into the purview of an external observer. Worse still is the problem of interactionism: the mind and the body must communicate. With an uncharacteristic lack of clarity, Descartes declared that the pineal gland was the place where interactions between res cogitans and res extensa occurred.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, 'substance dualism' arises from construing experience as things, rather than as processes involving participants.

A thinking thing (res cogitans) is a metaphorical reconstrual of a 'thing thinking', that is, of a senser mediating a cognitive mental process, through which ideas are projected into semiotic existence.

An extended thing (res extensa) is a construal of experience as a phenomenon of a perceptive mental process mediated by a senser.

Descartes' distinction is thus between the medium of a cognitive process (res cogitans) and the range (or agent) of a perceptive process (res extensa), this being a contrast along two dimensions: process type and degree of involvement in the process.

However, contrā Descartes, a thinking thing (res cogitans) is construable as located in time and space, as demonstrated by any clause in which a cognitive mental process is located in time and space, such as Einstein thought so in Bern in 1905.  Spatio-temporal location is thus not limited to the phenomena of perceptive mental processes.

On the other hand, although cognitive mental processes are not perceivable phenomena, the behavioural processes that manifest them are, as demonstrated by construals such as they saw him meditating.

they	saw	him meditating
Senser	Process: mental: perceptive	Phenomenon him meditating Behaver Process: behavioural