Cosmology Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 197):

Cosmology has formed part of the myth and the science of many civilisations. In it the mind has always played a central role, whether interior, exterior, or ulterior. It is natural for creatures like ourselves to wonder how everything came about, how we ourselves got here, and how we could come to be aware of the world in which we find ourselves. 

The religious cosmologies of the past have been replaced in some cultures by a scientific cosmology, one with remarkable ties to the farthest reaches of theoretical physics. But as grand and mysterious and beautiful as this scientific cosmology is, it has no inherent principle that would lead us to ourselves: observers who are conscious, who formulate physics and relate it to cosmology, and who have the urge to place ourselves within the scientific world view we have constructed. Even a "theory of everything," as some physicists call it, would be incomplete if it did not provide us with such a principle.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, cosmologies are reconstruals of the material-relational meanings of language, construed of experience, as the meanings of the language of mythology or science.  The reconstruals of meaning in the language of mythology deploy lexical metaphor, words as tokens of mythic values, whereas the reconstruals of meaning in the language of science deploy grammatical metaphor.

The rôle of the mind, of conscious observers, is to reconstrue the meaning of language as the meaning of the language of cosmology.

With regard to mythology, Joseph Campbell interprets its general function as putting humans in accord with their natural and social environments, and distinguishes four general functions: mystical, pedagogical, sociological and cosmological, with the sciences as the development of the last of these functions.