Limitations In Our Thought Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 161):

That consciousness arose in the material order does not restrain intellectual trade; philosophy itself is witness to this conclusion. But it does limit us, despite our capacity to extend our senses and our powers of calculation through physical devices. Given how meaning is defined in this book, we must accept a position of qualified realism. Our description of the world is qualified by the way in which our concepts arise. And although there may be infinite freedom within a grammar, our language and our ideas of meaning go far beyond the rules of grammar. … Despite the remarkable extensions of meaning by our calculations and our experiments, we must admit that we may well be limited in our thought by the way in which we are constituted as products of evolutionary morphology.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, our description of the world is a construal of experience as the meaning of language, with these meanings reconstrued in the language of science, philosophy, mythology, etc.  It is the grammar of language that construes — and so, makes possible — the types of meanings we can make, the ideas we can think, in the fields of science, philosophy, mythology, etc. — augmented by other semiotic systems, such as the pictorial, made possible by language.

The functioning of this mental-verbal domain of construing experience as meaning — higher-order consciousness — depends on the functioning of its material-relational domain; that is, on the functioning of an evolved, species-specific, socially embedded, embodied brain.