Imagine you’re looking up at the sky, with a number of things happening all the time:
Out of this ongoing change (represented pictorially by repeated elements), you can construe a quantum of change as one process configuration, realised in the grammar as one clause; for example: A kite is flying across the sky. With this, you’ve turned experience into meaning, and into wording.
² It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that there is some mode of objective phenomenal world that can be reflected in different ways in language (especially given our somewhat simplistic diagram, where we actually move from one semiotic representation to another, the first one standing for the outside world experienced); but there is not. We construe our experience actively by imposing organisation.
Blogger Comments:
[1] Strictly speaking, this is actually the reconstrual of the meaning of perceptual systems as the meaning and wording of language.
[2] To be clear, this relates to the 'immanent' epistemological stance with which SFL Theory aligns: that meaning is construed by semiotic systems of the meaningless. The "trap" in this case is the contrary epistemological stance that meaning is transcendent of semiotic systems.
Interestingly, most physicists are still "trapped" in this 'transcendent' view, despite the fact that Quantum Theory supports the contrary 'immanent' perspective (Wheeler's 'no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon). It is their unawareness of this epistemological distinction that leads physicists to describe quantum physics as 'bizarre' etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment