Edelman's 'Concept Formation' Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [4]

Edelman (1992: 110):

With this notion of concepts, in which the brain categorises its own activities (particularly its perceptual categorisations), it becomes possible to see how generalised categories and images might be embodied. It is also possible to see how events may be categorised as "past" without necessitating their being played out in present brain activities, as they must be for short-term memory and for the hippocampal succession leading to long-term memory. Furthermore, one can see how concept areas, by recursively restimulating portions of global mappings containing previous synaptic changes, give rise to combinations of relationships and categories. There is no need for any inherent logical order, classical categorisation, or prior explicit programming. Yet the means of concept formation described here could quite naturally be responsible for establishing the complex categories that I take up in the Postscript. Finally, because concept formation is based on the central triad of perceptual categorisation, memory, and learning, it is, by its very nature, intentional.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional linguistic theory, the formation of concepts through the brain categorising its own perceptual categorisations is the material means by which perceptual meanings, construed of experience, are organised into combinations of systems of related perceptual meaning, from the most general to the most delicate. Importantly, the intentionality of concept formation is of these meanings construed of experience.