Models Of How The Mind Works Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 153):

Why have I rejected as a basis for mind the apparent elegance of axiomatic and syntactic systems? Axiomatic systems often seem to provide the right clue as to how the mind works, especially when taken together with physics. But they are social constructions that are the results of thought, not the basis of thought. Their roots lie in the mathematical logic of the nineteenth century. They flowered with David Hilbert, were modulated and circumscribed by Gödel, and are often conceived of in a typological or essentialist fashion. They are not a good model for the mind, for the mind must preexist to create and drive them. Consciousness is essential for their formulation and also for the Platonism that they sometimes inspire, but the facts show that consciousness arose by evolutionary, not typological, means. Darwin was right: Morphology led to mind, and on this issue Wallace, who felt that natural selection could not explain the human mind, was wrong. Plato is not even wrong; he is simply out of the question.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, all models of how the mind works are "social constructions that are the results of thought", and "the mind must preexist to create and drive them", and "consciousness is essential for their formulation".

This is because models of the mind are reconstruals (intellectual reconstructions) of the meanings of language construed of experience, and it is language that is the basis of the thinking of higher-order consciousness.  Such models are social in the sense that they are intersubjective, since the expression of their meanings as wordings enables the exchange of such meanings in a community.