Fawcett's Epistemology

Fawcett (2010: 329-30):

The main rhetorical thrust of M&M's "Response to Huddleston" is a forceful rejection of almost all of what he says. Yet often, as we shall see, they do not show why we should reject arguments such as these, even sometimes accepting Huddleston's analysis. 

Instead, their major point is (following Halliday in his 'reply' to Matthews in the first stage of the 'rank scale' debate) that it is a virtue of Halliday's model that it raises questions about grammatical structure, rather than to establish that the IFG approach is 'right' and that the more traditional analysis that Huddleston offers is 'wrong'. This approach is fully justifiable at the exploratory stage, but systemic functional linguists have now had well over a quarter of a century to explore English in the systemic functional framework.

Even though Halliday may be right that language is ultimately "ineffable" (Halliday 1984/88), it seems to me that, as SF linguists, it is our task to carry out the research programme outlined earlier, i.e., to assemble the available evidence; to decide which relationships between examples should be given systemic priority in the model of the lexicogrammar; and to explain our decisions.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, here again Fawcett makes a bare assertion, unsupported by evidence, about an argument to presented later in order to prime the reader to prejudge the argument when it is finally presented.

[2] To be clear, this is a serious epistemological misunderstanding that pervades Fawcett's work. The notion that theories are right or wrong presumes that 

• there is one true model of phenomena, if only we could find it, and so that
• there are criteria for assessing theories that are themselves independent of theory.

Clearly, theories are contingent on the initial assumptions on which they are developed. Theories can be compared on the basis of explanatory potential, but this too is contingent on the assumptions on which each theory was developed, which include the functions the theory was designed to serve.

On the other hand, what can be assessed as "right" (consistent) or "wrong" (inconsistent) are interpretations of theory.

[3] To be clear, this is a serious misunderstanding. Halliday argues that it is grammatical categories that are ineffable, and in a specific sense. Halliday (2002 [1984]: 303, 306-7):

The meaning of a typical grammatical category thus has no counterpart in our conscious representation of things. There can be no exact paraphrase of Subject or Actor or Theme – because there is no language-independent clustering of phenomena in our experience to which they correspond. If there was, we should not need the linguistic category to create one. If language was a purely passive partner, ‘expressing’ a ‘reality’ that was already there, its categories would be eminently glossable. But it is not. Language is an active participant in the semogenic process. Language creates reality – and therefore its categories of content cannot be defined, since we could define them only by relating them to some pre-existing model of experience, and there is no model of experience until the linguistic categories are there to model it. The only meaning of Subject is the meaning that has evolved along with the category itself. … 

But a language is an evolved system; and evolved systems rest on principles that are ineffable – because they do not correspond to any consciously accessible categorisation of our experience. Only the relatively trivial meanings of a natural language are likely to be reducible to (meta-)words. Fundamental semantic concepts, like those underlying Subject, or Theme, Actor, New, definite, present, finite, mass, habitual, locative, are, in an entirely positive way, ineffable.