Saturday 30 March 2019

The 'Jamesian' Properties Of Consciousnesss Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 111):
Consider what I call its "Jamesian" properties (after James, who discussed them): It is personal (possessed by individuals or selves); it is changing, yet continuous; it deals with objects independent of itself; and it is selective in time, that is, it does not exhaust all aspects of the objects with which it deals.


Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional linguistic theory, the experiential nucleus of human consciousness is individual, but the content of consciousness is collective.

This is because the experiential nucleus of consciousness is a senser mediating mental processes, or a sayer mediating verbal processes, whereas the content of consciousness is the meaning potential of language.

The objects that consciousness 'deals with' are construals of experience as meaning, the content of consciousness itself.

Because the potential meanings afforded by experience are inexhaustible, the ways that experience is construed as meaning vary according to culture, and within cultures, according to cultural context, including theories and ideologies, and potentially changes over time, as texts unfold, as meaning potential develops in the life-time of individuals, and as meaning potential evolves in communities.

No comments:

Post a Comment