William James' View On Consciousness Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 37):

James's greatest achievement may have been to point out that consciousness is a process and not a substance in his characterisation of this elusive process in his essay "Does Consciousness Exist?", a question he also pursued in Principles.  Whitehead has made the claim that, with this inquiry, James was to the twentieth century what Descartes was to the seventeenth.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, human (higher-order) consciousness involves mental or verbal processes unfolding through a medium, senser or sayer, respectively.  Where the process unfolds through time, the participating medium persists through time.  In the case of mental processes, this can include the projection of ideas, the meanings of the semantic system of language; in the case of verbal processes, this can include the projection of locutions, the wordings of the lexicogrammatical system of language (that realise the meanings of the semantic system).  That is, the content plane of language constitutes the content of consciousness.

This ideational perspective is complemented by the interpersonal dimension of consciousness: the enactment of the self in intersubjective relations as meaning.

To these perspectives might be added a textual dimension of consciousness, second-order with respect to the other two dimensions, which involves the highlighting and cohesion of the other two, in ways that that make them coherent with respect to a given situation.

In this view, since language is a social semiotic system, higher-order consciousness is social and collective.  Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 609):

Language is a socio-semiotic system, so it follows that higher-order consciousness is constituted socio-semiotically; and since socio-semiotic systems are collective, it follows that higher-order consciousness must also be collective.