Sunday 9 September 2018

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.

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