Monday 28 November 2022

The Interrogation Of Nature Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 301-2):
The process of science is a process of interrogation of nature. Each experimental measurement, each observation, elicits answers from nature in terms of information bits. But more fundamentally, the essentially quantum nature of the physical world ensures that, at rock bottom, all such measurements and observations are reduced to answers of the simple "yes-no" kind. Is an atom in its ground state? Yes. Is an electron's spin pointing up? No. And so on. And because of the inherent uncertainty of quantum physics, these answers cannot be foretold. Moreover, the observer plays a key role in deciding the outcome of the quantum measurements — the answers, and the nature of reality, depend in part on the questions asked.


Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the questions put to nature and the answers they elicit as information bits are the meanings of language. The process of science includes reconstruing the meanings of data as the meanings of theory.

What Quantum Theory demonstrates is that yes-no polarity is a feature of instances, such as particles, but it is the space between yes and no, probability, that is a feature of the potential that particles instantiate. This, in turn, demonstrates that making meaning is interpersonal as well as ideational, since probability is an interpersonal assessment in terms of modality.

The key role of the observer is that it is the observer who construes experience as meaning, and as experimenter, decides which questions are to be answered — questions which depend on the theory being tested, and so on the assumptions on which the theorising is founded.

In this view, reality is the meaning that conscious processing construes and reconstrues of experience.

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