David Rose On The Reluctance To Divorce Language From Consciousness

David Rose wrote to Sysfling on 26 Mar 2023, 14:02:

A more general anxiety about relations between language and personhood exists in our own community. …

But SFL would not have progressed without separating out the systems from their uses and users.

One way our anxiety is expressed is a reluctance to divorce language from consciousness. Yet consciousness is a property of individual persons but language systems are a property of communities. They exist before, after and without the individual persons who use them.

By systems we mean both potential and actual – system and text. Instantiation is a relation between texts and systems, irrespective of persons.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Halliday makes a useful distinction between 'person' as a social individual and 'meaner' (language user) as a socio-semiotic individual. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 610):

The human individual is at once a biological "individual", a social "individual" and a socio-semiotic "individual":

as a biological "individual", s/he is an organism, born into a biological population as a member of the human species.

as a social "individual", s/he is a person, bom into a social group as a member of society. "Person" is a complex construct; it can be characterised as a constellation of social roles or personae entering into social networks … .

as a socio-semiotic "individual", s/he is a meaner, born into a meaning group as a member of a speech community. "Meaner" is also a complex construct. 

[2] To be clear, this "progress" in SFL is Martin's confused model of individuation and affiliation (critiqued here). Martin et al (2013):

[3] To be clear, for neuroscientist Edelman (e.g 1992), it is language that distinguishes higher-order consciousness from the primary consciousness that humans share with many other species. For Halliday (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999), the theory of experience that has evolved in language equates the content plane of language with the content of consciousness. Ideationally, consciousness is the interior symbolic processing of sensing, and the exterior symbolic processing of saying, which create content through projection, and interpersonally, consciousness is the self enacted as meaner: as an interactant in exchanges.

[4] To be clear, on the SFL model, the collective nature of language entails that human consciousness is also collective. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 609):

Edelman's interpretation of higher-order consciousness referred to above suggests that this form of consciousness (unlike primary consciousness) is constituted in language. Language is a socio-semiotic system, so it follows that higher-order consciousness is constituted socio-semiotically; and since socio-semiotic systems are collective, it follows that higher-order consciousness must also be collective. Collective consciousness is an attribute of human social groups — the members of a given culture. But we need to distinguish between the consciousness of a social group and the consciousness of a species, whose collective construal of experience is codified in the structure of the brain. All human populations have the same brain, and to that extent all construe experience in the same way. But humans live in social groups, and their local environments vary one from the other; to that extent, different groups construe experience in different ways. The significance of this for us is that language is the resource for both: both what is common to the species as a whole, and what is specific to the given culture. In the way these two components are construed in the grammar, we cannot tell them apart. But it is the role of language in the construction of experience as meaning — as shared activity and collaboratively constructed resource — that gives substance to the concept of collective consciousness as an attribute of the human condition.

Moreover, here Rose even contradicts the models that he is promoting. In Martin's models, a language user (persona) is an individuation of a culture, and their meaning potential (repertoire) is an individuation of the meaning potential of the community (reservoir).

[5] Clearly, languages do not exist without the individual persons who use them, as demonstrated by the phenomenon of 'language death'.

[6] This misleading, because it is untrue. To be clear, 'system' refers to potential, and 'text' to the instance of that potential.

[7] This is not misleading, because it is true.