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).