1 A Haunted Inheritance
Philosophy is full of ghosts. It speaks in the voice of being, will, substance, mind, and essence — and calls them real. But beneath these timeworn abstractions lies something far more familiar: language. For while philosophy has asked for centuries what the world is made of, it rarely asks what its own materials are made of — the materials of thought, argument, and theory.
We propose that a theory of language — and in particular the systemic functional model developed by M.A.K. Halliday — can help us excavate the buried scaffolding of these ideas. By attending to how meaning is made in language, we gain a new vantage point on what has been taken for granted in centuries of thought.
Language: The Invisible Medium
Theories are realised in language. Whether in Plato’s dialogues, Descartes’ meditations, or Nietzsche’s aphorisms, theory always comes to us as text. But language is not simply a vehicle for ideas. It is itself a system of meaning — structured, patterned, and oriented to action. Like the observer in physics, language has often been left invisible, its shaping influence ignored.
But if language is what theory is made of, then a theory of language can reveal the architecture of theory itself.
This series will follow three key relations from Systemic Functional Linguistics:
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Instantiation: the relation between potential and its individual instances (e.g., from system to text).
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Realisation: the relation between levels of symbolic abstraction (e.g., from meaning to wording, or from system to structure).
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Grammatical Metaphor: the reconfiguration of meaning across strata (e.g., turning processes into things — “he decides” becomes “his decision”).
Each of these semiotic relations corresponds to familiar philosophical moves: from the abstract to the concrete, from appearance to essence, from act to identity. And each, we will argue, has been misrecognised as metaphysical when it is in fact linguistic.
Haunted Concepts
When Plato speaks of perfect Forms, is he not projecting the systemic pole of the cline of instantiation? When Descartes divides mind from body, is he not reifying the clause structure of mental projection? When Kant marks the noumenon as unknowable, is he not confronting the boundary where language can no longer construe?
These are not missteps. They are moments where language itself becomes visible — not because it is recognised, but because it is misunderstood. The philosophical tradition is haunted not by ghosts from another world, but by the unexamined grammar of this one.
Renovating the History of Thought
To renovate is not to destroy, but to rehouse: to take the ideas that have shaped us and place them in new conceptual architecture. The goal of this series is not to dismiss philosophy, but to reconstrue it — to understand it as a history of meaning-making, structured by language and illuminated by it.
In the posts that follow, we will explore how the scaffolding of language underpins some of philosophy’s most iconic ideas. We will begin, appropriately, with Plato — and with his realm of eternal Forms. But we will not climb to a world beyond. We will follow the cline of instantiation.
2 Plato’s Forms and the Reification of Instantiation
Plato’s metaphysics begins with a distinction that has echoed across millennia: between the world of appearances and the world of Forms. The first is changeable, sensory, particular. The second is eternal, intelligible, universal. We live among the many; only the Forms are truly one.
But what if Plato was not discovering a transcendent realm, but projecting a semiotic architecture — one that belongs not to the cosmos but to language?
The Cline of Instantiation
In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), meaning is construed along a cline of instantiation:
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At one end is the system — a structured potential for meaning.
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At the other is the instance — a concrete enactment of that potential in a specific context.Every time we speak or write, we instantiate the system — and in doing so, we add to its potential.
Plato’s ontology closely mirrors this architecture.
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The Form is the pure potential: the universal, unchanging idea of Justice, Beauty, or Tree.
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The particular is the instance: the just act, the beautiful painting, the tree in the grove.
Plato treats the Form as more real than the instance. But in SFL terms, this is a reversal: the system is a potential that exists only by virtue of its instances. It is abstracted from what has been said and done — not the other way around.
From Ontology to Semiotic Architecture
What happens if we read Plato’s metaphysics not as a vision of a metaphysical order but as a misrecognition of the semiotic order? His world of Forms is the system pole of instantiation, reified into an independent realm. His world of appearances is the instance pole, treated as a poor copy of the ideal. But in language, the system and the instance are not in competition — they are mutually constitutive.
Each instance contributes to the shape of the system; each system makes further instances possible. There is no need to posit a second world to account for the regularities of this one. What Plato mistook for eternal reality was the abstract structure of meaning itself.
The Danger of Reification
Plato’s move is not unique. It is part of a wider philosophical habit: the reification of semiotic relations — taking structural features of language and treating them as metaphysical truths.
When the abstract is separated from the concrete, and treated as its origin, the result is metaphysics. But when we see that the abstract arises through the concrete, and returns to it in use, we shift from metaphysics to semiotics.
Instantiation, not Imitation
Plato calls the particular an imitation of the Form. But in SFL terms, it is not an imitation — it is an instantiation. It is not a flawed copy of a perfect original, but a meaning-making event that both draws on and contributes to a system of potential.
Plato's error — and perhaps philosophy’s original ghost — was to mistake the architecture of meaning for the structure of the world.
Next time, we’ll trace another haunting: how the grammatical metaphor of action gives rise to the metaphysical concept of the Will.
3 The Will and the Reification of Desire
In Western metaphysics, the Will appears as a sovereign force. It acts, chooses, asserts — often in tension with reason, impulse, or fate. In some philosophies, it becomes the seat of the self; in others, the engine of the universe.
But from the perspective of language, the Will is not a metaphysical entity. It is a grammatical pattern, projected into the world and mistaken for its foundation.
Desire as a Grammatical Process
Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) classifies clauses according to process types, each construing a kind of experience as meaning. One such process is mental desiderative:
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I want a new idea.
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She hopes to understand.
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They wish it were otherwise.
Here, ‘want’, ‘hope’, and ‘wish’ are not expressions of force but semiotic processes. They construe the internal world of the speaker — not by referencing something called the Will, but by enacting a grammatical relation: a subject experiencing a mental orientation toward a desired object or outcome.
The Will is born when this pattern is reified. That is, when we take the linguistic projection of desire and treat it as a metaphysical force, as if wanting were a thing rather than a relational meaning.
From Process to Power
Grammar allows us to construe the self as a subject who acts. In doing so, it supplies the raw material for philosophical claims about agency.
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I decide.
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I resolve.
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I impose my will.
These are all clause structures in which the subject is medium and the process is intentional. But in language, such clauses are choices — not proof of a metaphysical faculty. The grammar of action provides a model of agency, but not its ontological foundation.
The Will arises when this model is lifted from its semiotic grounds and projected into the structure of reality — as if it were the cause of action rather than its construal.
The Fiction of the Autonomous Subject
The metaphysical Will also requires a metaphysical subject — a self that exists apart from its relations. But in SFL, the subject is a position in meaning, not an ontological entity. It is constituted by its participation in grammatical structures, including those of mental and verbal processes.
The autonomous self, like the Will it wields, is not a given. It is a construct, born of grammatical roles, culturally reinforced, and philosophically enshrined.
Unmasking the Ghost
When we see that language can construe desire as a process, not a power, the ghost of the Will begins to dissipate. What philosophy calls the Will, linguistics calls a desiderative clause. The metaphysical becomes grammatical — and in doing so, becomes tractable, analysable, and demystified.
In our next post, we’ll look at causality — and how the grammar of transitivity shaped the metaphysical search for necessary connections in nature.
4 Cause and Effect — Transitivity and the Machinery of Nature
Causality is one of philosophy’s deepest problems. What does it mean for one thing to cause another? Is causation a force, a law, a regularity, or an illusion?
But in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), causation is not a mystery. It is a grammatical resource.
Transitivity: Grammar’s Model of Experience
In SFL, the grammar of the clause construes experience through transitivity — the system that organises processes and their participants. A clause like:
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The sun melts the ice…construes a material process (melts), an actor (the sun), and a goal (the ice).
This is not a metaphysical claim. It is a semiotic configuration. The grammar does not discover causation in the world; it construes experience as causative by selecting from available grammatical patterns.
There is no metaphysical necessity here — only a semiotic regularity.
From Clause to Cosmos
When we elevate these patterns into metaphysics, we reify them. Clause structures become models of the world’s deep machinery:
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X causes Y.
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The will moves the body.
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Every event has a cause.
These are not discoveries of pure reason or empirical law. They are grammatical construals taken for ontological structures.
In this way, the grammar of transitivity becomes the ghost in the machine — animating our models of force, change, and inevitability.
Necessary Connection or Grammatical Expectation?
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He dropped the glass. It shattered.
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Because it rained, the picnic was cancelled.
Here, logical and temporal relations are grammatically construed — not given by nature. The sense of necessity is a product of textual cohesion, not metaphysical structure.
What philosophy calls causality, grammar construes as sequenced process.
Causal Chains as Grammatical Chains
Scientific explanation often seeks causal chains. But these chains are not neutral observations; they are narratives, built from clauses in which agency, process, and goal are selected according to meaning.
To explain an event is to construe it in a particular voice — grammatically, not just empirically.
In our next post, we’ll explore the reification of truth itself — and how logocentric philosophies mistake the grammar of projection for an external order of reality.
5 Truth and Projection — The Linguistic Architecture of Reality Claims
What is truth? A correspondence with reality? A coherence among propositions? A pragmatic utility?
In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), these abstract theories can be grounded in a concrete fact: truth is not discovered outside language — it is construed within it.
The Clause Complex and Projection
In SFL, the grammar of projection allows language to refer to itself:
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She said that it was raining.
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He believes the earth is round.
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I know that this is true.
Here, the projecting clause (she said, he believes, I know) introduces a projected clause — a meaning encoded as content. This is grammar’s way of construing semiosis itself as a phenomenon.
When philosophers speak of propositions, they are talking about projected clauses — language about language, meaning about meaning.
But when projection is reified, it ceases to be a grammatical function and becomes a metaphysical belief:
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Truth exists independently of thought.
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Propositions have truth-values.
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There is a realm of facts to be matched.
These are not philosophical discoveries. They are grammatical arrangements turned into ontologies.
Truth as Projection Reified
This shift from projection to assertion is a grammatical shift, but it is often mistaken for an epistemological one.
In reality, the grammar of projection allows us to navigate degrees of certainty, modality, and evidentiality — not to discover an objective realm of truth, but to construe our commitments to meaning.
Metaphysics as Misrecognised Grammar
Philosophy’s theory of truth often begins where grammar has already done its work. What was once a projecting clause becomes an ontological commitment. The distinction between content and commentary collapses into a belief in objective propositions.
Thus, the idea of truth as correspondence — a thought mirroring the world — is grammar misunderstood as metaphysics.
We do not discover truths. We construe propositions, and construe our orientation toward them.
In our next post, we turn to the concept of essence — that oldest of metaphysical categories — and ask whether it, too, is not a ghost born of grammatical processes.
6 Essence and the Grammar of Being
Where does the idea of essence come from?
Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, Western philosophy has been haunted by the notion that behind every appearance lies an underlying substance — an essence — that makes a thing what it is.
But what if this metaphysical commitment to essence is, at its root, a grammatical commitment?
The Nominalisation of Process
In Systemic Functional Linguistics, one of the most powerful meaning-making strategies is nominalisation — the transformation of a process or quality into a ‘thing’:
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She is wise → Her wisdom
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They govern → Government
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We differ → There is a difference
Nominalisation allows language to package experience into stable entities that can be named, described, possessed, or analysed. This syntactic sleight of hand is the origin of many theoretical constructs — not only in everyday reasoning, but in philosophy, science, and law.
When philosophers seek the essence of courage, beauty, or justice, they often begin by treating these nominalised abstractions as if they were entities with hidden cores, rather than grammatical construals of process and relation.
Essence as Identifying Process
SFL treats identity as a process — a relational clause type. In sentences like:
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A circle is a round plane figure.
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Water is H₂O.
The verb is enacts an identifying relation — not a metaphysical union, but a semiotic equivalence between two functions in a clause. The structure makes one element the "Token" (the signifier) and the other the "Value" (the signified), inverting the usual logic of substance and property.
Philosophy often reifies this identifying relation into a theory of essence. It takes the structure of a clause and turns it into a structure of reality:
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What is X? becomes What is the essence of X?
But in grammar, this is simply a way of construing meaning — a form of categorisation, not a window into noumenal reality.
The Illusion of Inherent Properties
When we say:
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Gold is heavy.
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Justice is fair.
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The soul is immortal.
We are drawing on attributive relations, projecting qualities onto entities. These too are grammatical: they belong to the system of intensive attribution. Yet over time, the constant co-occurrence of entity and quality becomes naturalised — taken as evidence of essence rather than of meaning-making.
Thus, the ghost of essence is born: an abstract identity, imagined as real, sustained by patterns of language.
7 Language as Origin — A Semiotic Ontology of Thought
In this final post, we draw together the threads of our journey — from Plato’s Forms to Nietzsche’s Will — to propose not the rejection of the philosophical tradition, but a re-reading of it: not as a map of reality, but as an archaeology of meaning.
Throughout the series, we’ve suggested that many core philosophical concepts are not false as such, but fossilised — sedimented residues of semiotic processes that have been turned into metaphysical doctrines. In every case, the origin of the concept was not the world itself, but language’s way of making sense of it.
The Semiotic Roots of Ontology
Systemic Functional Linguistics shows that meaning is organised by systems of choices — systems that are both structured and dynamic. These systems allow us to construe experience as meaningful, to project thoughts, to track agency and causation, and to distinguish appearance from reality.
But these same resources can also become invisible. As philosophy turns its gaze outward — toward Being, Will, Substance, Truth — it often forgets that the terms in which it does so are themselves products of a semiotic architecture.
In other words: philosophy speaks the grammar of meaning without often knowing it.
This is not a critique of philosophy, but a proposal: that the concepts we inherit are crystallised expressions of the architecture of language. To understand their power — and their limits — we must make visible the semiotic scaffolding that supports them.
Theories as Reconstruals of Meaning
Science, philosophy, and mythology all reconstrue the meaning of language. They are not simply ‘ideas about the world’, but second-order systems that re-interpret first-order meaning.
In each case, the movement is the same: from semiotic process to metaphysical reification. A verb becomes a noun. A clause becomes a doctrine. A projection becomes a substance.
Philosophy, then, can be read as the metaphysics of grammar.
Language as Origin, Not Obstacle
Traditionally, language has been treated in philosophy as either a transparent medium (a vehicle for truth) or a frustrating barrier (a source of confusion). But SFL offers a third view: language is the origin of meaning, not its distortion.
We do not simply describe the world with language; we construe it. The categories of thought — subject, predicate, cause, agent, event, intention, possibility — are not given by nature, but constructed in and through language.
To speak is not just to say something about the world. It is to make a world meaningful.
A Semiotic Ontology of Thought
If we take this seriously, then a theory of language offers more than just a tool for interpreting texts. It becomes a meta-theory: a way of reading the history of ideas as the history of meaning-making.
Plato, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche — and countless others — were not wrong. They were, we might say, listening closely to the architecture of their own thought, without yet knowing its grammar.
A semiotic ontology does not replace philosophy. It re-grounds it. It shows that the most profound metaphysical questions — What is being? What is truth? What is self? — are also questions about the architecture of meaning.
And so we conclude not with a rejection of metaphysics, but with its renovation. A theory of language does not solve the great problems of philosophy. It lets us see how those problems arose, and how — by attending to the meanings we live by — we might begin to live them differently.
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