The True ‘Road To Reality’ Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 1027-8):

As the reader will gather from all this, I do not believe that we have yet found the true ‘road to reality’, despite the extraordinary progress that has been made over three and one half millennia, particularly in the last few centuries. Some fundamentally new insights are certainly needed. Yet, some readers may well still take the view that the road itself may be a mirage. True — so they might argue — we have been fortunate enough to stumble upon mathematical schemes that accord with Nature in remarkable ways, but the unity of Nature as a whole with some mathematical scheme can be no more than a ‘pipe dream’. Others might take the view that the very notion of a ‘physical reality’ with a truly objective nature, independent of how we might choose to look at it, is itself a pipe dream.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, there is no true road to reality, but there are construals of experience as reality that may be valid or invalid with regard to theory and the assumptions on which a theory is founded.

The notion of a true road to reality assumes that reality transcends construals of experience rather than that reality is the construal of experience as meaning. The 'transcendent' assumption has been invalidated by the experiments of quantum mechanics. Reality is intersubjective, rather than objective.