Edelman's 'Conceptual Capabilities' Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 108):

The word "concept" is generally used in connection with language, and is used in contexts in which one may talk of truth or falsehood. I have used the word concept, however, to refer to a capability that appears in evolution prior to the acquisition of linguistic primitives. What is this capability? 

An animal capable of having concepts identifies a thing or an action and on the basis of that identification controls its behaviour in a more or less general way. This recognition must be relational: It must be able to connect one perceptual categorisation to another, apparently unrelated one, even in the absence of the stimuli that triggered those categorisations. The relations that are captured must allow responses to general properties- "object," "up-down," "inside," and so on. Unlike elements of speech, however concepts are not conventional or arbitrary, do not require linkage to a speech community to develop, and do not depend on sequential presentation. Conceptual capabilities develop in evolution well before speech. Although they depend on perception and memory, they are constructed by the brain from elements that contribute to both of these functions.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, Edelman's 'conceptual capability' is the ability to organise construals of experience into systems of relations, a fundamental requirement for the evolution and development of semiotic systems.

At the most fundamental level, this is the ability to organise construals of experience into systems of perceptual meaning, and this, in turn, provides the means, in socio-semiotic species, of organising some of these construals, (Saussurean) signs, into systems of protolanguage, from which language evolved and develops in humans.