RSSHow To Enrich And Re-Orient Cognitive Science
Mar 30
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[1] Add ‘saying’ and ‘symbolising’ to ‘sensing’, and add meaning as enacting (interpersonal) to meaning as construing (ideational).
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.
[2] Realignment: to ‘know’ something is to have transformed some portion of experience into meaning.
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 603):
… the concept of ‘mind’ should be brought into close relation with other phenomena — biological, social, or semiotic. … But once this has been done, the mind itself tends to disappear; it is no longer necessary as a construct sui generis. Instead of experience being construed by the mind, in the form of knowledge, we can say that experience is construed by the grammar; to ‘know’ something is to have transformed some portion of experience into meaning. To adopt this perspective is to theorise “cognitive processes” in terms of semiotic, social and biological systems; and thus to see them as a natural concomitant of the processes of evolution.
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