Berkeley's Monistic Idealism vs Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 35):

And Berkeley's monistic idealism — suggesting that inasmuch as all knowledge is gained through the senses, the whole world is a mental matter — falters before the facts of evolution. It would be very strange indeed if we mentally created an environment that then subjected us (mentally) to natural selection.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, there is a distinction between experience and its construal as meaning.  In construing experience as meaning, there is a distinction between a material order phenomena (the physical world) and semiotic order metaphenomena (mental and verbal representations).

It is not that the "world" is mental, but that 'the world' — as perceived, thought or talked about — is meaning construed of experience.