Language As A Theory About The Material World

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 602):

… language models the space–time environment, including itself, in a “rich” theoretical mode: that is, both construing it (our ideation base) and enacting it (our interaction base).

Language As A Part Of The Material World

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 602):

… the processes of language take place in physiological (including neural) and physical space and time.

Three Ways Language Is Related To Our Material Being

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 602):

Language is able to create meaning because it is related to our material being (ourselves, and our environment) in three distinct and complementary ways. … it is a part of the material world … it is a theory about the material world … it is a metaphor for the material world …

Language Creates Meaning

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 602):

Language is not a second–order code through which meanings created in some higher–order realm of existence are mysteriously made manifest and brought to light.  To borrow the conceit that Firth was fond of caricaturing, there are no “naked ideas” lurking in the background waiting to be clothed.  It is language that creates meaning, in the sense that meaning has for us as human beings (which is the only sense of it that we can know).

Blogger Comment:

It was Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) who said:

Language is the dress of thought, 

though he also said:

Words are but the signs of ideas.

The Model Of Consciousness In Language

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 601):

The folk model — developed unconsciously and collectively out of shared experience over hundreds of generations — construes and enacts the complexity of being a person by bringing to it a multiplicity of perspectives. It extends the ‘mind’ by refracting it through language, the resource that makes the “cognitive operations” possible and by the same token ensures that they are not subjective but intersubjective.

How To Enrich & Re-Orient Cognitive Science

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 601): 

… cognitive science should not only be ‘cognitive’, it should also be semiotic, because it is the notion of meaning that enables us to see the connection between sensing and saying, and between theory and enactment of consciousness.

Ideational & Interpersonal Perspectives On Consciousness Depend On ‘Projection’

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 600):

The potential for projecting is shared by sensing and saying; and when they are construed together, they reveal a very powerful principle that is embodied in the folk model: that through projection, we construe the experience of ‘meaning’ — as a layered, or stratified phenomenon, with ‘meanings’ projected by sensing and ‘wordings’ projected by saying. … Interpersonally, projection is a mode of enactment — in moves in dialogue, interactants enact propositions and proposals. Interpersonal metaphors of mood and modality bring out the relationship between the two: here interactants simultaneously both enact propositions and proposals interpersonally and construe this enacting in such a way that the ideational construal comes to stand as a metaphor for aspects of the interpersonal enactment.

How To Enrich & Re-Orient Cognitive Science

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 600):

Both these perspectives — that of the construal of processes other than the mental (saying and symbolising), and that of meaning as enacting as well as meaning as construing — are absent from the cognitive science modelling of mind; and in our view they could with advantage be brought into the picture when we try to understand these complex and central areas of human experience. To do so would both enrich the cognitive model and steer it away from obsessions with information, with knowledge as a separate ‘thing’ divorced from meaning, and with mind as the exclusive property of an individual organism bounded by skin.

Interpersonal Perspective On Consciousness

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 600):

If we move outside the ideational metafunction to the interpersonal, the resource through which we interact with other people, we find that here we are acting out our conscious selves — “modelling” consciousness not by construing it but by enacting it. Since this type of meaning is non–referential it is not taken account of in scientific theories at all.

Ideational Perspective On Consciousness

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 599-600):

The ideational resources of language are primarily a theory of experience, so they are reflected fairly directly in consciously designed theories such as those of cognitive science. If we stay within the ideational metafunction, where mental processes are construed, we also find other processes that are complementary to these: those of saying (verbal processes) and symbolising (a type of relational process).

How To Enrich & Re-Orient Cognitive Science

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 599, 600): 

At the same time the ‘scientific’ models of the mind fail to extend consciousness in the way it is extended by the grammar of English.  There are, in fact, two complementary perspectives embodied in the semantic and grammatical systems of English; and together they point towards an alternative interpretation both of ‘information’ as constructed in cognitive science and of the individualised ‘mind’ that is its object of study. … [These are] the construal of processes other than the mental (saying and symbolising), and that of meaning as enacting as well as meaning as construing.

Psychology And Psychoanalysis

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 599): 

In a way … material reinterpretation [psychology] and ‘unconsciousness’ [psychoanalysis] are opposites: the first reconstrues sensing in terms that are more readily observable by scientific method (ie method other than introspection), while the other introduces a factor that is even less readily observable than conscious sensing: unconscious motivation. But they share the characteristic that they construct the ‘mind’ as remote from our everyday experience with sensing.

Psychology And Psychoanalysis

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 599): 

These two models move away from the folk model in two directions. (i) They reinterpret figures of sensing as figures of doing or being–&–having; that is, they interpret mental phenomena in material terms. … (ii) They emphasise motivation as an important unconscious psychological factor; thus they introduce unconsciousness in the workings of the human mind. In the systems of process types in the grammar, there is no ‘unconscious’ type of sensing distinct from the conscious ones that can project ideas.

Cognitive Science’s Effacement Of Sensers

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 598):

… the metaphorical reconstrual of mental processes effaces the Sensers involved in these processes — the conscious beings, prototypically human, who are thinking, knowing, believing, remembering and so on. This effacement of the Sensers is of course not accidental: in fact, one central feature of the way in which cognitivists reconstrue mental processes in metaphorical terms is that the grammatical metaphor makes it possible to distance the account from our everyday experience. …

Given this orientation, it would thus seem that the unified senser existing as a person who “senses” is an illusion construed by the grammar as part of a folk theory of our own sense of conscious processing.

Cognitive Science As A Metaphorised Folk Model

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 598):

The mainstream cognitive science model is thus basically derived from a variety of the commonsense model. It creates a metaphorical distance from experience as construed in our congruent grammar, so that the conscious processing that we experience can be reconstrued as a ‘subconscious’ domain that we do not have access to — an abstract space where figures of doing & happening and being & having are the ones that operate, rather than figures of sensing. This would seem to be at one remove (at least) from the folk model, which might reasonably be seen as one of experientialist cognition in Lakoff’s (1988) sense — one that is in direct contact with the everyday, embodied experience of Sensers.

Formal-Cognitivist Alliance

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 596n):

Alongside this cognitivist approach, there is a material one embodied in formal approaches to semantics, where the ‘aboutness’ of linguistic expressions is taken as central and these expressions are interpreted in terms of models of possible worlds. However, in this respect there is a formal-cognitive alliance: meaning is interpreted not as something in its own right but as something outside language, either a mental construct (concepts, ideas etc) or a material one (referents in the real world or a formal model of a possible world).

The Mainstream Cognitive Science Model

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 596):

The ‘scientific model’ in mainstream cognitive science is centrally concerned with information located in the individual’s mind. The information is organised in some way as a conceptual system.

The Central Motif In Cognitive Science’s Metaphorical Reconstrual Of Sensing

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 596):

… sensing is ‘extracted’ from figures of sensing as a domain, and reified to become one of a variety of participants that take on rôles in figures of being & having and doing & happening, taking place in the mind construed as a container.

Cognitive Science Is Closed To The Interpersonal Dimension

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 596):

Since Sensers are effaced, and projections are lost as a feature of the Senser/sensing complementarity, the gateway to the interpersonal realm — where Sensers are enacted as interactants in dialogic exchange — is closed, and the interpersonal element in the ideational/interpersonal complementarity is lost.

Cognitive Science Can Taxonomise Sensing

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 596):

Since figures of sensing are reified as participants, the path is opened up to the taxonomic interpretation of sensing, in the form of a scientific taxonomy: memory — long term/short term memory, sensory memory, semantic memory; recall — free recall; learning — associative learning / cognitive learning / classical conditioning; … .

Cognitive Science Construes Sensing As A Space For Participants In Doing & Being Processes

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 595-6):

Since figures of sensing are reified as participants, they can themselves be construed in participant rôles. Here another feature of the folk model is taken over: its spatial metaphor is retained and further elaborated. Thus the mind is construed as a space where the metaphorical participants of sensing are involved in processes of doing-&-happening and of being-&-having: thoughts, concepts, memories, images are stored located, retrieved, activated and so on.

Cognitive Science Effaces Sensers And Loses Projection

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 595):

Since figures of sensing are reified as participants, the processes of sensing are likewise turned into things, and the participants in sensing, the Sensers, are typically effaced. The Senser/sensing complementarity of the folk model is thus lost, as is the feature of Sensers projecting ideas into existence.

Cognitive Science Reifies Sensing

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 595):

Since it is not taken over as theory, the fundamental insights of the folk theory are ignored: figures of “Sensers sensing (that …)” are re-construed through grammatical metaphor as participants. In particular, the domain of sensing is reified as the “mind”, so that instead of somebody perceiving things happening, or somebody thinking that the moon was a balloon, the model of cognitive science has perception, vision, cognition, learning, memory …

Consciousness As The Domain Of Sensers Sensing

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 595): 

The congruent ideational system separates out consciousness from the rest of our experience and construes it as a domain of sensing, embodying a Medium + Process complementarity where conscious beings (Medium) perceive, think, want, feel (Process). Sensing is thus ‘mediated’ through the Senser; and this process may project ideas into semiotic existence. This domain of Sensers sensing (that …), which is construed in congruent system, is taken over in cognitive science. However, it is not taken over as being itself a theory of conscious processing; instead, it is treated as a phenomenon — that is, sensing is turned into the object of study.

Why Cognitive “Science” Is Not A Scientific Alternative To The Folk Model

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 595):

… while the domain of scientific theorising about cognition is determined by the grammar of processes of sensing, the model is depersonalised, and sensing is construed metaphorically in terms of abstract “things” such as knowledge, memory, concepts. This suggests that mainstream cognitive science is basically an elaborated variety of a folk model, rather than a different scientific alternative …

The Reifications Studied By Cognitive Scientists

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 594):

… the object of study of cognitive [science] is constructed by ideational metaphor, as reified sensing (perceiving, thinking) or as the names of sensing (the mind, mental phenomena).

The Folk Model That Is Cognitive “Science”

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 590):

The spatial metaphor of the commonsense model is taken over by cognitive science. It serves as the sources of processes in their model of the mind — processes of storing, searching, retrieving etc within figures of doing & happening and processes of being located at/in within figures of being & having. That is, processes of sensing are reified, and processes of doing & happening and of being & having take their place. The spatial metaphor also opens up the way for modelling the mind along computational lines: human memory can be modelled on computer memory.

Sensers Are Effaced From The Cognitive Science Model

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 588-9): 

The possibility of leaving participants implicit means in practice that Sensers are effaced in the scientific model and, as a result, the consciousness we experience in the living of a life is also construed out of the picture, being replaced with unconscious processes not accessible to our experience.

From Folk Model To Cognitive Science Model

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 586-7, 588):

What is the nature of the move from our everyday construal of the experience of consciousness — our folk theory of Sensers sensing phenomena or projecting ideas — to the way cognitive scientists construe that experience? We can see the essential nature of this move when the folk theory is reconstrued as if it was a scientific one. … 

The scientific model is metaphorical; and it stands as a metaphor for the congruent folk model.

Sensing Construed As A Bounded Domain

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 585, 586):

The grammar thus construes sensing as a bounded domain within our total experience of change. This picture is further enriched through lexis, prominently through lexical metaphors. Metaphors relating to space, with the mind as a container, a finite space or a physical entity reinforce the grammar’s construal of a bounded domain of sensing. … 

This mind-space may enter into material processes of storing, searching, crossing, escaping etc, either as participant or as circumstance, and also into relational processes of “being + Location”. It is interesting to note that in these various lexical metaphors the Sensers are still very much present; they are not effaced. In fact, a number of these lexical metaphors constructed on the model of material clauses retain the option of projecting … [eg] he kept in mind that the moon was a balloon …

Externalising Consciousness

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 584): 

The everyday grammar’s contribution to the construal of sensing is thus both rich and varied. Some features of it are particularly significant to the uncommonsense model of mainstream cognitive science. The grammar separates out consciousness from the rest of our experience in the form of mental processes, capable of projecting ideas; but in addition, consciousness can be ‘externalised’ in the form of verbal processes, capable of projecting locutions.