(Critiques Of) Berkeley's Idealism Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 212):

Such a position [panpsychism] "scientises" another view originally based on the philosophy of idealism. In it the world is perceived only through the mind and thus perhaps, as Bishop Berkeley proposed, there is no matter, only mind. On hearing this, Dr. Johnson kicked a stone and stated, "I refute it thus." A better refutation comes from the theory of evolution: If natural selection gives rise to sentient animals, it is difficult to see how the selecting environment and the brain can both be mental events in a single sentient animal that also has progeny undergoing natural selection. The mind reels trying to comprehend how such a complication would ever come to pass.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, both matter and mind are construals of experience as meaning: the material-relational domain and the mental-material domain.

A stone is a construal of experience as first-order meaning of the material-relational domain, whereas "I refute it thus" is construal of experience as second-order wording: a projected locution of the mental-verbal domain.

However, whereas the brain is also a construal of experience as first-order meaning of the material-relational domain (data), the selecting environment is a reconstrual of first-order meaning of the material-relational domain as meaning of the language of evolutionary biology (theory).