1 The Ghosts of Logic Past: How Grammar Became Metaphysics
A forensic examination of how linguistic categories were mistaken for the furniture of the universe
Western philosophy is haunted. Not by gods or spirits, but by ghosts of grammar — spectral traces of language mistaken for the structure of reality itself. In this post, we take the forensic scalpel to the metaphysical tradition, exposing the silent transubstantiations by which patterns of wording became ontological commitments. The story begins not in a lab, nor in the field, but in the grammar book.
1. Scene of the Crime: Grammar as Ontology
Let’s begin at the source: Aristotle’s Categories. Here, grammatical distinctions become ontological ones. Substance and attribute, subject and predicate — these aren't just linguistic constructions in Aristotle’s hands; they’re construed as the deepest structure of what is. The linguistic scaffold becomes metaphysical skeleton.
-
Substance is what stands alone (like a noun).
-
Accidents are what modify substance (like adjectives and verbs).
-
The copula (‘is’) becomes the blueprint of being: to be is to be predicated.
Thus, the clause becomes a metaphysical diagram. The world, on this view, is carved up like a sentence.
2. The Reign of the Copula: To Be or Not to Be a Reification
This conflation deepens in the hands of medieval scholastics, who transmute grammatical predication into ontological hierarchy: God is pure substance, humans are composite substances, accidents are lesser beings. The verb ‘to be’ — a humble tool of linguistic linkage — becomes a metaphysical powerhouse. Existence itself is equated with being predicated of a subject.
What’s been smuggled in is this: grammar is not being used to describe being — it is being.
The reification is complete.
3. Kant and the Synthetic Mirage
Kant, for all his brilliance, preserves the ghost. In the Critique of Pure Reason, his Table of Judgements (which underpins the Categories of the Understanding) is lifted wholesale from traditional subject–predicate grammar. The mind, he claims, imposes forms on experience — but these forms are patterned after the kinds of statements grammar allows.
Kant did not free us from metaphysical grammar. He encoded it as transcendental. Once again, language becomes the form of thought, and thought becomes the form of the world. The ghost persists, only now wearing the robes of epistemology.
4. Logic as Sanitised Grammar
With Frege and Russell, the metaphysical load-bearing function of grammar is sanitised into formal logic. But the apparatus remains: variables, predicates, quantifiers — all echo the grammar of the clause. The subject–predicate relation becomes the function–argument relation. Identity, negation, modality — each formalised, abstracted, but still ultimately drawing their contours from natural language.
Formal logic, in this sense, is not a pure medium of thought. It is an idealisation of a particular language’s grammar, projected onto the universe as if it were mind-independent. The attempt to escape language by formalising it simply further entrenched its categories.
5. The Epistemological Fallout
Once these grammatical ghosts have been mistaken for metaphysical furniture, philosophy becomes a long exercise in rearranging the furniture. Realism, idealism, substance dualism, monism, essentialism — each position inherits the architecture of the clause:
-
Is reality one or many? (Number — a grammatical feature.)
-
Is something essentially what it is, or only accidentally so? (Modifiers.)
-
What is the subject of being? (Nominalisation.)
-
What does it mean to say something is? (The copula again.)
These are not eternal questions. They are theoretical artefacts of linguistic reification. We confuse the semiotic scaffolding of meaning with the ontology of the world.
6. The SFL Intervention
Systemic Functional Linguistics gives us the tools to expose and dissolve these ghosts. By recognising that grammar is a stratified, meaning-making system — not a mirror of ontology — we can stop treating linguistic architecture as metaphysical structure.
-
The subject is not a metaphysical entity; it is a grammatical function.
-
Being is not a substance; it is a process type.
-
Categories are not mind-independent universals; they are meaning potentials shaped by discourse communities and instantiated in context.
Grammar doesn’t reflect reality. It construes it — and different languages construe it differently. There is no universal skeleton of being beneath the clauses. Only systemic choices actualised in texts.
7. Conclusion: Towards a Semiotic Metaphysics
To move forward, philosophy must stop mistaking grammar for God. The categories of language are not the categories of the real; they are semiotic artefacts shaped by history, culture, and function.
A truly radical metaphysics — if one is still desired — must begin not with what is, but with how meaning is made. And that means starting with language, not as a vehicle for expressing thought, but as the architecture through which reality is construed.
2 A Forensic History of Meaning Potential
From metaphysical possibility to semiotic system: a reconstruction of what could have been — and was misunderstood
Western thought has long been obsessed with what could be. From Plato’s Forms to modal logic, from the possible worlds of Leibniz to the counterfactuals of contemporary metaphysics, philosophy has reached again and again for the concept of potential. But in doing so, it has rarely asked: What is potential? Or more precisely: What is it that makes potential meaningful?
Here, we reconstruct a forensic history of meaning potential — not as metaphysical indeterminacy, but as semiotic system. We trace how potential was reified, ontologised, and abstracted — and how a theory of language, such as that offered by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), offers a radically different construal.
1. The Reification of Potential: From Possibility to Platonic Form
The earliest philosophical accounts treated potential as a kind of being in suspension. Aristotle’s dynamis was not non-being, but a kind of lesser being — matter’s openness to form, the acorn’s promise of oakhood. But even here, we see a slippage: potential is treated not as a meaning construed by language, but as a metaphysical condition of reality itself.
Thus begins a long tradition: treating potential as a substance waiting to be actualised, rather than a set of semiotic affordances defined by a system of choices.
The acorn is not an oak tree in waiting. It is a token of a biological system in which certain developmental pathways are probabilistically favoured — depending on context. Its potential is systemic, not essential.
2. Medieval Modalities: The Ontology of the Might-Have-Been
In scholastic theology, possibility becomes a tool for divine speculation. What could God have done? What possible worlds could exist? Modal logic is born. But its machinery is built atop metaphysical assumptions about being and necessity, not a theory of systemic meaning.
-
Necessity becomes a feature of reality, not a construal of high-probability co-selections within a meaning system.
-
Possibility becomes metaphysical license, not semiotic openness.
This is a moment of profound confusion: the modal auxiliaries of grammar (‘might’, ‘could’, ‘must’, ‘should’) are treated as reflections of ontological structure, rather than systems of interpersonal and logical modality actualised in context.
We are mistaking grammatical modality — a resource for construal — for metaphysical modality — a doctrine of being.
3. Enlightenment and the Mechanics of the Possible
Leibniz’s possible worlds introduce combinatorics into ontology. But the logic of possibility here is again imagined as a structure that reality obeys, not a set of choices within a meaning system. The metaphysical becomes computational, but still unmoored from semiosis.
Kant, too, misreads potential as transcendental: the possible forms of judgment are fixed, a priori. But these forms are derived from grammar — subject, predicate, negation — not from any analysis of meaning-making as such.
Potential becomes structural, universal, and pre-linguistic. Meaning potential is never allowed to emerge as such — as a condition of meaning systems, rather than of minds or metaphysical realities.
4. Modern Linguistics and the Lost System
Fast-forward to Chomsky. Here, finally, is a theorist interested in potential. His competence/performance distinction centres on the idea of a generative capacity — a set of possible sentences. But this is a mathematised abstraction: ‘possible’ means ‘well-formed according to rules’, not likely to be instantiated in context.
Chomsky strips language of semantics, context, and meaning. His potential is syntactic. It is a tree of formal derivations, not a network of meaning potentials.
The result is a curious irony: a theory of potential that explains why we can say nonsense (‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’) but cannot account for why we don’t.
SFL, by contrast, defines potential not as a syntactic capacity, but as a semiotic resource: a structured system of meaning options available to a community. Meaning potential is a probabilistic space, shaped by:
-
Stratification (meaning realised in wording)
-
System networks (organised choices)
-
Instantiation (how meaning is actualised in context)
-
Individuation (how individual meaning potentials develop from the collective)
This is a view of potential as construal, not essence.
5. Meaning Potential as Probabilistic System, Not Metaphysical Possibility
In an SFL-informed view, potential is not what could metaphysically occur, but what can be semiotically meant — given a system and a context. Importantly:
-
It is structured: not an open field, but a network of systemic relations.
-
It is collective: belonging to a speech community, not just to a speaker.
-
It is gradable: some options are more likely to be selected (instantiated) than others.
-
It is dynamic: the system itself changes as patterns of instantiation shift.
In short: potential is not a metaphysical residue. It is a meaning system in readiness.
6. The Forensic Finding: Philosophers and Linguists Mistook the Possible for the Potential
We can now issue our forensic conclusion. Across traditions, theorists conflated:
| Semiotic Potential | Metaphysical Possibility |
|---|---|
| Systemic | Essential |
| Probabilistic | Determinate or indeterminate |
| Collective | Ontological |
| Contextual | Abstract |
| Meaning-bearing | Substance-assigning |
This confusion has fuelled entire traditions: modal logic, essentialism, competence grammars, even certain strains of AI and cognitive science.
But once we see potential as meaning, not metaphysics, we can rebuild. We can construe meaning potential as:
A systemic, probabilistic, stratified semiotic architecture by which experience is made intelligible — both collectively and individually — in context.
This restores potential to the realm of meaning, where it belongs.
3 Semiotic Engines: Reconstructing the Architecture of Thought
From metaphysical minds to stratified semiosis: how language generates the very possibility of cognition
What thinks? What generates thought? The traditional answer has been: a mind. Whether cast as a Cartesian substance, a Kantian faculty, or a computational architecture, the mind has served as an ontological engine of thought — a mysterious something that somehow gives rise to ideas.
But what if this question, and its answers, have all been misframed?
What if thought is not something generated by a mind, but something actualised in language? What if the architecture of thinking is semiotic, not metaphysical?
This post reconstructs thought itself as a stratified semiotic phenomenon — not reducible to grammar, but not conceivable without it. Not because language “expresses” thought, but because thought is the construal of experience as meaning, and language is the architecture by which that construal occurs.
1. The Metaphysical Myth of the Thinking Thing
Descartes famously declared Cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. The statement presumes a metaphysical agent — the res cogitans — capable of generating thought from within.
But what is “thinking,” if not a way of meaning?
Descartes treats thinking as a pre-linguistic faculty, but cannot explain how this faculty acquires content — how it becomes about anything. He thus inherits a deeper myth: that thought is a kind of internal speech, and speech a kind of external thought.
This view still dominates contemporary discourse:
-
In cognitive science: thought is symbol manipulation in the brain.
-
In philosophy of mind: thought is propositional attitude.
-
In AI: thought is computational output from formal rules.
All of these presume a substrate-independent capacity to represent the world — as if meaning arises prior to semiosis.
But if meaning arises only through construal, and construal is realised through language, then there can be no thinking without a semiotic system.
2. Language as the Engine of Thought
Systemic Functional Linguistics offers a revolutionary construal: language is not a mirror of thought; it is the material of thought itself — in its semiotic order.
To think is to make meaning — and to make meaning is to actualise options in a stratified, systemic, probabilistic architecture. This architecture includes:
-
Semantics: the construal of experience as meaning — ideational, interpersonal, and textual.
-
Lexicogrammar: the semiotic engine room, where meanings are bundled and linearised through systems of wording.
-
Phonology (or other modalities): the sounding of meaning, through rhythm, intonation, and prosody.
Thought, then, is not a ghost in the machine, but a pattern of selection in a meaning system — a probabilistic trajectory through semiotic space.
The mind does not generate language. Language is the architecture that realises what we call ‘mind’ — as patterned semiotic activity.
3. The Role of Instantiation and Individuation
Two processes are crucial here:
a) Instantiation:
The movement from meaning potential to meaning instance — from the structured possibilities of the system to the actualised selections of a text or utterance.
Each thought is an instantiation — a selection from a system, realised in context.
b) Individuation:
The process by which an individual’s meaning potential develops from the collective system — not by internal generation, but through social semiosis.
You do not “have” thoughts. You develop a personalised range of meaning potentials through interaction. The more richly you instantiate meaning, the more delicately individuated your meaning potential becomes.
What we call a ‘mind’ is not a metaphysical entity but a semiotic trajectory through system and instance, shaped by social interaction.
4. The Myth of Non-Linguistic Thought
A common objection: But what about visual thinking? Emotion? Intuition?
These are not denied. But they are not meanings until construed — and construal requires a semiotic system. Images, emotions, and sensory experiences become thought only when they are patterned into meaning.
Language does not suppress other forms of experience; it makes them intelligible — by construing them as symbolic patterns, organised across strata and systems.
Even “non-verbal” thought relies on prior semiotic development. The very ability to “see a pattern,” “recognise a face,” or “expect an outcome” presupposes an entrenched system of categorisation and abstraction — most often developed through language.
5. Language as the Theory of Theories
If language generates the possibility of thought, then a theory of language is a theory of cognition.
This inverts the Chomskyan model:
-
Chomsky: The mind generates language via Universal Grammar.
-
SFL: Language generates mind via instantiation and individuation.
It also transforms philosophy itself. Every theory — of time, being, mind, cause — is a textual artefact: an actualisation of meaning in language. And so:
A theory of language has the power to reconstrue the language of theories.
The history of philosophy is a record of semiotic strategies mistaken for metaphysical discoveries. Once we understand the architecture of meaning, we can reanalyse the architecture of thought — and rewrite its history as a history of semiotic construals.
6. The Forensic Finding: There Is No Ghost, Only the Machine
We return now to our title: Semiotic Engines. Thought is not generated by a ghostly mind. It is actualised by a stratified semiotic engine — language — whose systemic architecture enables the construal of experience.
This engine is:
-
Stratified: meaning is realised in wording, which is realised in sounding.
-
Probabilistic: patterns of use shape patterns of potential.
-
Social: meaning systems are shared, and thought is co-evolved through interaction.
-
Dynamic: individual minds emerge through individuation — through selective instantiation of collective meaning.
There is no need to posit metaphysical minds or innate grammars. What we need is a material-semiotic theory of meaning — one that can explain how experience becomes intelligible, and how intelligibility becomes consciousness.
The mind is not a container of thoughts. It is the semiotic space in which thoughts can be actualised.
4 Rewriting Consciousness: Meaning, Matter, and the Semiotic Self
How semiotic architecture remakes the mind, dissolves metaphysics, and grounds selfhood in meaning
1. The Traditional Ghost in the Machine
Consciousness has long been the fortress of mystery. The “hard problem” — how subjective experience arises from physical matter — continues to defy clear explanation.
Philosophical dualism posited a ghostly mind separate from the body; materialism reduced consciousness to brain activity but failed to account for the richness of experience.
Most contemporary theories stumble on a fundamental confusion:
-
They treat consciousness as a thing — a container, a “mind-stuff,” a property.
-
They treat experience as raw sensation, before it is meaning.
-
They treat selfhood as metaphysical substance, rather than a semiotic construal.
2. Semiotics as the Missing Link: Consciousness as Construal
From the perspective of systemic functional linguistics and semiotics, consciousness is not a thing — it is a process of meaning-making.
Meaning is not an epiphenomenon of matter; it is a construal — an organising of experience into semiotic patterns.
Consciousness, then, is the actualisation of semiotic potential in the unfolding flow of experience. It is the semiotic space where:
-
Experience is shaped into meanings,
-
Meanings are stratified,
-
Meanings are individuated, personalised, and rendered coherent,
-
Meanings become the felt quality of subjective life.
Consciousness is the semiotic actualisation of the material order of experience.
3. Matter and Meaning: Not Opposites but Partners
Material phenomena provide the raw experiential field — sensations, perceptions, events.
But raw material is not yet conscious. It is meaning potential, awaiting construal.
Meaning is a relational mode of being, realised semiotically through stratified systems. It emerges in matter but is not reducible to it.
Consciousness is the intersection of the material flow of experience and the semiotic system of meaning — a dynamic construal, not a metaphysical essence.
4. The Semiotic Self: Individuation Through Meaning
What about the self? Not an enduring substance, but a semiotic construct arising through the dynamic process of individuation:
-
As individuals instantiate meanings, they develop unique configurations of meaning potential.
-
Through interaction, these potentials evolve, become more complex and personalised.
-
The self is a pattern of semiotic activity — a trajectory of meaning instantiated over time.
This reframes identity:
-
Not as a fixed metaphysical entity,
-
But as a processual semiotic emergence.
5. Implications for Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience
-
Philosophy: Dispenses with the ghost, dissolves the “hard problem” by reframing consciousness as semiotic actualisation.
-
Psychology: Recognises cognition as semiotic patterning, not mere information processing.
-
Neuroscience: Sees brain activity not as consciousness itself but as the material basis that enables semiotic construal.
6. Towards a Semiotic Materialism
The mind-body problem becomes a mind-matter semiotic continuum. Meaning arises from material conditions, but is not identical to them.
This opens new paths:
-
Understanding consciousness as material-semiotic construal,
-
Investigating how systems of meaning co-evolve with neural and bodily systems,
-
Exploring the social genesis of individual semiotic selves.
Final Forensic Finding
Consciousness, selfhood, and mind are emergent phenomena of stratified semiotic processes actualised in material experience.
The ghost in the machine was never a ghost at all — but a misunderstanding of semiotic architecture.
No comments:
Post a Comment