Employing Two Logical Fallacies: 'Argumentum Ad Populum' And 'Appeal To Authority'

Fawcett (2010: 49):

It was passages such as the two cited immediately above that led many systemic functional linguists — including myself — to interpret Halliday as suggesting that the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and so on should be regarded as the semantics of a language. We accepted this as a major insight, and used it as the basic assumption for a re-interpretation of the earlier system networks. I myself first expressed this position publicly in Fawcett (1973/81), writing that 

'Meaning' is concerned with the intra-linguistic level of semantics. [...] A network may therefore be regarded as a summary of a complex area of meaning potential [my emphasis] (Fawcett 1973/81:157). 

And Berry, in her classic introduction to systemic linguistics, writes that 

the terms in a system [...] are distinct meanings within a common area of meaning [my emphasis] (Berry 1975:144). 

In a similar vein Kress, in his insightful account of the development of Halliday's ideas, states that 

the freeing of system from surface structure has a consequence that systems are now made up of terms which are semantic features [my emphasis] (Kress 1976:35).

Blogger Comments:

[1] Here Fawcett supports his misunderstanding* of Halliday by means of the logical fallacy known as 'Argumentum ad populum':

Argumentum ad populum (appeal to widespread belief, bandwagon argument, appeal to the majority, appeal to the people) – a proposition is claimed to be true or good solely because majority or many people believe it to be so.

[2] In giving authoritative weight (classic, insightful) to the opinions of these linguists, Fawcett also supports his misunderstanding* of Halliday by means of the logical fallacy known as 'Appeal to authority':

An appeal to authority is an argument from the fact that a person judged to be an authority affirms a proposition to the claim that the proposition is true. Appeals to authority are always deductively fallacious; even a legitimate authority speaking on his area of expertise may affirm a falsehood, so no testimony of any authority is guaranteed to be true.

* See any of the previous posts on the distinctions

• between meaning potential (language as system) and meaning as stratum (semantics), and
• between functional grammar (wording viewed from semantics) and semantics (meaning).