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.

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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.