Autonomous Syntax Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 67-8):

As I discuss in the Postscript, however, proposals that the brain and the mind function like digital computers do not stand up to scrutiny. The idea of mental representations posited without reference to brain mechanisms and structures does not fare much better. An examination of how animals and people categorise the world, and how babies mentally develop, undercuts the idea that language can be adequately explained by syntactical analyses carried out in the absence of an adequate explanation of meaning.  The objectivist view of the world is at best incomplete and at worst downright wrong. The brain is not a computer and the world is not a piece of computer tape.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, syntax is the form that meaning takes, so the Chomskyan Formal Linguistics notion of autonomous syntax is nonsensical.  Meaning is the function that syntax performs.

Objectivist Cognitive Science Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 67):

The cognitive position was to adopt notions derived from logical and formal analysis, putting an emphasis on syntax. In this view, the mind, like a computer, is organised by rules and operates by mental representations. Meanings or semantics are supposed to arise by mapping these rules onto classically categorisable events and objects. Unlike behaviourism, this view allowed one to look into the mind but then described it as if it were a formal system. This description floated more or less free of the detailed structure of the brain. The semantic mapping of that description onto the world is objectivist; things and events are unequivocally described as classical categories.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, in emphasising syntax, cognitivism  takes the perspective of the lower level of symbolic abstraction on two dimensions, emphasising structure over system (axis), and emphasising form over function (stratification).  In doing so, it downplays both choice (system) and purpose (function).

In mapping its description onto the world, cognitivism takes a transcendent perspective on meaning, since it assumes a prior discriminated world onto which meanings can be mapped. In contrast, SFL theory takes the perspective that all discriminations of the world are meanings — properties of semiotic systems — construed of experience, and that meaning is intersubjective.

Behaviourist Psychology Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 67):

One reaction to this state of affairs was to declare the subject off limits and insist that science should concern itself only with behaviour that was observable in ways defined by the forms of successful scientific inquiry concerned with nonintentional objects. In an attempt to salvage the "scientific" posture without denying intentionality, and in contrast to this behaviourism, a different position was later taken by cognitive science.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, the behaviourist approach to psychology is an attempt to model behaviour broadly within the mechanistic epistemological framework established by Galileo, focusing on measurable primary qualities, rather than secondary 'subjective' qualities. In Cartesian terms, this is modelling behaviour in terms of res extensa rather than res cogitans.

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, behaviourism is concerned with the behavioural manifestations of consciousness rather than consciousness itself: mental and verbal processes, and their projections, ideas (meanings) and locutions (wordings).

Objectivism And Consciousness Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 67):

In many domains, this ["objectivist"] approach worked enviably well (and still does), but when the mind was put back into nature by nineteenth-century studies of physiology and psychology, a series of difficulties began to emerge. One of the first of these difficulties was that the observer could no longer neglect mental events and mental experience. He could no longer ignore consciousness itself or the fact that conscious experience was intentional — always in reference to an object. The mechanisms of this consciousness were not directly transparent, nor could consciousness be studied directly as an external object — at best, it could be introspected or indirectly inferred from the behaviour of others.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the construal of experience as observations, and their reconstruals as scientific theory, are mental events, mental experiences.  Observations and theories are the content (meaning) of consciousness, as are the objects construed of experience as phenomena (meaning).

The mechanisms of consciousness are the 'inner' processes of consciousness: mental processes that project interior content (ideas) and verbal processes that project exterior content (locutions).  These are distinct from the 'outer' material and relational processes of an embodied brain — the physiological form that realises the semiotic functions of consciousness.

"Objectivist" Physical Science Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 66-7):

As long as science and scientific observers dealt with physical objects and natural forces independent of the minds of the observers, a grand set of theories within a group of compatible sciences could afford to ignore the psychological intricacies of scientific observers. While their sensations and perceptions went into the performance of their experiments and into intersubjective exchanges with their colleagues, these sensations and perceptions were strictly excluded from their theoretical and formal explanations. Aside from a few difficulties at the boundaries of the very small (in quantum measurement) or of the very fast or large (in relativity theory), the scientific observers' participation appeared to be from a God's-eye view. An "objectivist" picture of nature developed that distinguished things from each other by "classical categories": categories defined by singly necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. These were then mapped onto the physical world in an unambiguous fashion by incorporating experimental data into far-reaching physical theories.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, physical objects and natural forces are meanings (realised as wordings) construed of experience.  As meanings, they are material phenomena that can be construed either as that over which consciousness ranges, or as agents that impinge on consciousness.  In this sense, physical objects and natural forces are entirely dependent on minds.  By the same token, theoretical and formal explanations are also meanings construed of experience: projections of consciousness (metaphenomena).  The mapping of categories onto the physical world is the reconstrual of first-order phenomena (the physical world) as second-order metaphenomena (categories).