Intentionality And Referral Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 238):

With the homunculus, we come to one of the great problems in considering the matter of the mind: the problem of accounting for intentionality itself. We have already shown that formal semantics cannot refer unambiguously to real states of affairs. But many of the causal aspects of our mental states depend on semantic contents. As Searle has stressed, semantic contents are meaningless without intentionality or the ability to refer to other states or objects. To carry out referral, a formal representation must become an intentional one. In human beings, this requires a consciousness and a self — a biologically based personal awareness, a first person. No theory of mind worth its salt can evade this issue, which is not only a matter of language but also a great biological problem.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, 'real states of affairs' are meanings that are construed of experience of the non-semiotic domain by the processes of consciousness (the mental-verbal domain).

On this view, 'referral' involves the correlation (identification) of meanings of perceptual systems with meanings of language, such that perceptual tokens realise linguistic values.  This identity encodes linguistic values by reference to perceptual tokens (in ontogenesis) and decodes perceptual tokens by reference to linguistic values (in logogenesis).