The Theory Of Neuronal Group Selection And Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 81):

Brain science and the study of behaviour are concerned with the adaptive matching of animals to their environments. In considering brain science as a science of recognition I am implying that recognition is not an instructive process. No direct information transfer occurs, just as none occurs in evolutionary or immune processes.  Instead, recognition is selective.

Blogger Comments:

On Edelman's model of neuroscience, the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), meanings do not flow into the brain; a labelled environment does not instruct the brain in its categorisation.  Instead, impacts on sensory sheets result in the selective matching of neuronal groups to sensorimotor events.  This is consistent with the 'immanent' view of meaning on which Systemic Functional Linguistic theory is based.  In this view, there are no meanings 'out there' to flow in to the brain. Instead, impacts of the environment on the body are construed as meaning.  Edelman's neuroscientific model construes the material and relational processes that underpin the construal of experience as meaning, as proposed by Systemic Functional Linguistic theory.

'Recognition' Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 74):

By "recognition," I mean the continual adaptive matching or fitting of elements in one physical domain to novelty occurring in elements of another, more or less independent physical domain a matching that occurs without prior instruction.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, when applied to brain function, this construes the material and relational processes that underlie the construal of experience as meaning.

Population Thinking Vs Platonic Essentialism In Linguistic Theories

Edelman (1992: 73):

It is not commonly understood that there are characteristically biological modes of thought that are not present or even required in other sciences. One of the most fundamental of these is population thinking, developed largely by Darwin. Population thinking considers variation not to be an error but, as the great evolutionist Ernst Mayr put it, to be real. Individual variance in a population is the source of diversity on which natural selection acts to produce different kinds of organisms. This contrasts starkly with Platonic essentialism, which requires a typology created from the top down; instead, population thinking states that evolution produces classes of living forms from the bottom up by gradual selective processes over eons of time.

Blogger Comments:

Linguistic theories can be distinguished according to whether they embrace population thinking or Platonic essentialism.  

Population thinking, where variation is treated as real, underlies the dimension of instantiation in Systemic Functional Linguistics.  The frequencies of features in instances of language, texts, establish the probabilities (of instantiation) of such features in the overall system of potential.  Registers of language vary in terms of instantiation probabilities of system features, or, from the complementary perspective, text types vary in terms of the frequencies of feature instantiations.  Language change occurs when the frequency of a new variant in texts significantly raises its systemic probability of being instantiated.

Platonic essentialism, where variation is treated as error, underlies the distinction between competence and performance in Chomskyan Formal Linguistics.  As Chomsky (1965) declared:

Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its (the speech community's) language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance.

Population thinking accommodates evolutionary and developmental change; Platonic essentialism does not.

Perceptual Categorisation Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 69):

Brains contain multiple maps interacting without any supervisors, yet bring unity and cohesiveness to perceptual scenes. And they let their possessors (pigeons, for example) categorise as similar a large if not endless set of diverse objects, such as pictures of different fish, after seeing only a few such pictures.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, perceptual categorisation is the construal of experience as perceptual meaning.  This is a somatic, rather than social, semiotic system.  In social species, perceptual meanings are further correlated with those of a social semiotic system, which in the case of humans, includes those of language, and what an individual "sees" depends on such correlations.