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).

Misrepresenting Halliday On Instantiation

Fawcett (2010: 48-9):

Ten years later, Halliday was still writing in similar terms — but only at times, as we shall see in Section 4.6. Here, for example, is an excerpt from his "Introduction" to Readings in systemic linguistics (Halliday & Martin 1981). Notice that he distinguishes and defines the two relationships of 'instantiation' and 'realisation' in very similar terms to those used in Sections 3.1 and 3.2 of Chapter 3. (Here he characterises the relationships as "processes", because he is thinking in terms of a generative model of language.)

'Instantiation' is the process of selecting within the sets of options (the systems) that make up the meaning potential (the system). It is the process of choosing. By this step particular paths are traced through the network of paradigmatic alternatives. [...] 'Realisation' is the process of making manifest the options that have been selected. It is the process of expressing the choices made. By this step meanings are encoded in wordings [my emphasis]. (Halliday 1981:14) 

Here Halliday is characterising 'instantiation' at the level of meaning, in terms of Figure 4 in Chapter 3, but there is also, of course, as we saw in Chapter 3, a process of instantiation at the level of form.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading because it is untrue, as we shall see in the examination of Section 4.6.

[2] This is misleading because it is untrue, as was demonstrated in the examination of Sections 3.1 and 3.2 of Chapter 3.  As all the critiques of Fawcett's model (Figure 4) demonstrate — see, for example, here — Fawcett's use of 'instantiation' and 'realisation' are inconsistent with the theoretical notions.  See also [5], below.

[3] To be clear, instantiation and realisation are types of attributive and identifying relational processes, respectively; see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 144-5).

[4] This is misleading because it misrepresents Halliday in a way that favours Fawcett's argument.  In the quote, Halliday characterises the process of instantiation for any system, not just at the level of meaning.  (As explained in previous posts, Fawcett misunderstands Halliday's meaning potential — language as system — as merely the level of semantics.)  Halliday then goes on to contrast instantiation with the realisation relation between content strata: meaning (semantics) and wording (lexicogrammar).

[5] Fawcett's "instantiation" at the level of form (Figure 4) is the relation between realisation rules and syntagmatic structure.  It can be seen that, contrary to Fawcett's claim (critiqued above in [2]), this interpretation of instantiation is entirely inconsistent with Halliday's characterisation of instantiation as  'selecting within systems of options'.

Misrepresenting Halliday (1966) In A Footnote

Fawcett (2010: 48n):

To understand fully what is at stake here, we must recognise the fact that linguists employ two main metaphors for thinking about the levels of language. In the longer established metaphor, the more abstract phenomena such as 'meanings' of various types are regarded as 'higher', and the more concrete phenomena, such as the spoken and written forms of language, are thought of as 'lower'. But in the metaphor implied in the use of Hockett's terms "deep structure" and "surface structure" (as later taken over by Chomsky and others) this model is inverted. In this metaphor, the extension of the model of syntax to take account of 'semantics' involves the addition of a 'deep' or 'underlying' representation, this being seen as the 'level' within syntax that is nearest to meaning. In other words, in choosing to give "Some notes on 'deep' grammar" the title he did, Halliday was adopting the terminology of the then dominant theoretical model of language. In contrast, he had presented in "Categories" a diagram in which the relationships are horizontal, in which "context" is on the left, "form" is in the middle" and "substance" is on the right. After Halliday (1966/76), however, he quickly moved to the use of the model of language in which 'context' and 'meaning' are higher than 'form' and in which 'substance' is lower. It seems that he was influenced in this — at least in part — by the way in which the relationships between the strata of language are represented in Lamb's Stratificational Grammar (from which Halliday took the word "realisation" for its use in denoting the relationship between levels). So in Halliday (1977/78:128), for example, we find a model in which 'meaning' is above 'form' and 'phonetics' is below.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Here Fawcett misleads by contrasting 'meaning' with 'spoken and written forms of language' instead of 'form'.  In Fawcett's own model, it is meaning that is the higher level of abstraction, and form that is the "more concrete".  Spoken and written forms of language, on the other hand, are language — i.e. all strata — that vary at points along the cline of instantiation, according to the contextual feature of mode.

[2] In terms of present-day SFL theory, Fawcett here confuses the dimension of symbolic abstraction ("more abstract" vs "more concrete"), in this case: stratification, with the dimension of instantiation ("deep" vs "surface").  The "inversion" is not of the stratification hierarchy, but in the representation of the cline of instantiation, where "deep" (potential) is schematised above "surface" (instance).

[3] Here Fawcett tries to make sense of his confusion by locating potential ("deep or underlying") as a higher level of symbolic abstraction within his level of form ("the level within syntax that is nearest to meaning").  In terms of Fawcett's own model (Figure 4), "deep or underlying" at the level of form actually corresponds to his bottom-left module, the intersection of potential and form: realisation rules/statements. 

[4] This is misleading because it misrepresents Halliday.  Halliday (1966) is concerned with arguing for the system as the underlying form of representation ('deep grammar').  The deep vs surface distinction in this early paper is not the stratification of levels of abstraction.

[5] This is misleading because it implies that Halliday (1966) is a reworking of the stratification hierarchy in Halliday (1961).  Trivially, but unsurprisingly, the diagram in Halliday (1961) is laid out in the opposite way to Fawcett's description, as shown below:

[6] This confuses the orientation of diagrams (theoretical expression) with levels of symbolic abstraction (theoretical content).

[7] The theoretical advantage of the term 'realisation' is that it explicitly identifies the relation between strata as an identifying: intensive: symbolic between a lower Token and a higher Value.  This is a case of turning the theory back onto itself.

Misrepresenting Halliday's Clause Systems As Semantic Systems

Fawcett (2010: 47-8):

We come now to a second and equally important change to the theory. It has already been hinted at in Halliday's use of the terms "deep" and "underlying" in the passage cited above to describe the level of the systemic representation. But it was signposted more clearly when Halliday wrote a few pages later (1966/76:96) that "underlying grammar is 'semantically significant' grammar".  By 1970 Halliday had begun to describe the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and so on as the meaning potential of a language, and so as being at a separate level from that of the structures that are 'predicted by', and so 'derived from', the semantic features in the system networks. For example, he wrote in one classic passage: 

A functional theory of language is a theory about meanings, not about words or constructions. [...] Where then do we find the functions differentiated in language? They are differentiated semantically, as different areas of what I call the 'meaning potential' [my emphasis]. (Halliday 1971/73b: 110) 

And he then went on to describe these "areas" as the "networks of interrelated options that define, as a whole, the resources for what the speaker wants to say", and to identify them as the networks for TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and so on.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, as explained in a previous post, the "change to the theory" here is not a change to "the" theory, but a change of theory: from Scale and Category Grammar to Systemic Functional Grammar.

[2] Here Fawcett again confuses the relation between potential and instance, instantiation, with the axial relation between paradigmatic system and syntagmatic structure, realisation.  Instantiation is an attributive relation, whereas realisation is an identifying relation.  As explained in previous posts, this confusion constitutes one invalidation of the architecture of his theoretical model (Figure 4).

[3] The unwarranted intrusion of the word 'semantic' here is misleading, since it misrepresents Halliday in a way that favours Fawcett's argument; see [4].

[4] As if to counter Fawcett's misunderstanding of Halliday (1971) on this point, Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 49) write:

Being a ‘functional grammar’ means that priority is given to the view ‘from above’; that is, grammar is seen as a resource for making meaning — it is a ‘semanticky’ kind of grammar. But the focus of attention is still on the grammar itself. 

Giving priority to the view ‘from above’ means that the organising principle adopted is that of system: the grammar is seen as a network of interrelated meaningful choices.

In other words, Halliday models the grammar from the perspective of semantics — i.e. in terms of the meaning that the wording realises — and Fawcett misunderstands this as modelling the semantics.

Misrepresenting Halliday On 'Form'

Fawcett (2010: 46):

As we saw in Chapter 2, Halliday takes the position in "Categories" that everything within 'grammar' is part of the same level of language, i.e., 'form' 1961/76:53). The four "categories of the theory of grammar" and the three "scales" that relate them were therefore all presented as belonging within 'grammar', and so as all being at the same level of language. 

Blogger Comments:

This is misleading in a way that suits Fawcett's later argument.  The valeur of 'form' in Fawcett (2010) and Halliday (1961) is significantly different.  For Fawcett, the level of 'form' contrasts with the level of 'meaning', as shown in his Figure 4 (p36).  For Halliday, on the other hand, the level of 'form' contrasts with the levels of 'substance' and 'context'.  Halliday (2002 [1961]: 39):

The substance is the material of language: phonic (audible noises) or graphic (visible marks). The form is the organisation of the substance into meaningful events: meaning is a concept, and a technical term, of the theory (see below, 1.8). The context is the relation of the form to non-linguistic features of the situations in which language operates, and to linguistic features other than those of the item under attention: these being together “extratextual” features. …

Form is in fact two related levels, grammar and lexis.
Context is in fact (like phonology) an interlevel relating form to extratextual features.