Mental Representation as a Category Error

🧠 Edelman on Mental Representations

Gerald Edelman, especially in his theory of Neural Darwinism and in works like Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), rejects the idea of mental representations as discrete internal symbols or stored models. Instead, he insists that consciousness and cognition emerge from dynamic, context-sensitive processes in neural systems—not from the manipulation of representations. Here’s a brief sketch of Edelman’s position.

Edelman critiques the representationalist view on both neuroscientific and philosophical grounds:

1. Degeneracy over coding
   Neural circuits are degenerate: different neural configurations can produce the same functional output. This undermines the idea of fixed internal representations or mappings from input to meaning.

2. Reentrant connectivity
   The brain functions through reentrant signalling—continuous recursive communication between and within neural maps. There is no central model or representation, only ongoing coordination across distributed areas.

3. Embodied, dynamic systems
   Cognition is the result of embodied interaction between the organism and its environment. Meaning is not stored internally but arises through history-dependent patterns of activation shaped by bodily experience.

4. Selectional systems, not representational ones
   The brain is a selectional system (like evolution): it doesn’t encode representations, but selects among variations generated through development and experience. This is radically different from computationalist models of representation.

“There is no image, no homunculus, no representation in the brain. There is only the capacity to categorize and to select from past activity.”

— Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, p. 120

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Edelman’s view aligns with many systemic theorists’ non-representational stance—notably Halliday, Matthiessen, and Thibault—who have long argued that language is not a system of internal representations, but a socially-constructed semiotic resource.

In fact, Edelman provides neuroscientific validation for the idea that:

• The brain does not need representations to support language use.

• Cognition can be understood as emergent, context-sensitive, and relational.

• Systems (like language) are better conceived as structured potentials for construal, not as storage systems of meaning.

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Why Edelman Was Right: Mental Representation as a Category Error

What emerges from Edelman’s work is a view that not only undermines the idea of mental representation, but also supports a non-representational, relational ontology in which meaning is neither internal nor stored.

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Mental Representation: A Problematic Inheritance

The notion of “mental representation” has long been central to many traditions in linguistics, particularly those influenced by cognitive science. The idea is simple, perhaps deceptively so: when we understand language, we do so by constructing internal models or symbolic representations—of concepts, sentences, or mental images—that can be retrieved or manipulated by the mind.

This metaphor of storage and retrieval has deep roots in the computational view of mind. But it carries with it several assumptions:

• That cognition is a matter of processing symbolic input.

• That knowledge consists of stored internal content.

• That meaning exists prior to and independent of context, residing inside the brain.

These assumptions, however, are exactly what Edelman calls into question.

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Edelman’s Rejection of Representationalism

In Bright Air, Brilliant Fire and elsewhere, Edelman argues that the brain does not represent the world internally in any meaningful way. Instead, it categorises experience through patterns of neural activation shaped by selection, history, and interaction with the environment. There are no internal models or stored symbols—only coordinated, dynamic patterns of neural activity, continuously shaped by feedback loops.

“There is no image, no homunculus, no representation in the brain. There is only the capacity to categorize and to select from past activity.”

— Gerald Edelman (1992, p. 120)

In place of representations, Edelman proposes:

• Degeneracy: Multiple neural configurations can give rise to the same functional outcome. This rules out the idea of one-to-one mappings between input and internal representations.

• Reentrant connectivity: The brain is massively recursive, with ongoing signalling across distributed maps. Meaning is not stored—it is emergent from ongoing coordination.

• Selectional dynamics: The brain is more like a Darwinian system than a computer. It doesn’t encode; it selects from structured potentialities based on past experience and current context.

In short, Edelman offers a vision of cognition that is relational, emergent, and embodied—not representational, symbolic, or internalist.

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Conclusion: The Real Error

Mental representation is not just a flawed model. It is a category error. It mistakes the infrastructure that supports construal for the construal itself. It reifies meaning as substance. It confuses system with storage. It localises meaning where meaning does not reside.

Edelman saw this clearly from the vantage point of neuroscience. It’s time more linguistic theories saw it too. 

Performing Knowledge: A Field Guide to Epistemic Authority in Academia

In academic spaces, it is often not just what is said but how it is said that shapes whose knowledge counts—and who gets to speak. This series explores the performative voices of academic authority: the tones, postures, and rhetorical moves through which legitimacy is claimed, maintained, and contested. From the confident formalist to the self-effacing empiricist, each entry dissects a familiar academic archetype, exposing the power dynamics embedded in scholarly discourse. More than satire, these parodies are diagnostic tools—inviting readers to recognise the patterns that govern knowledge production and to imagine new ways of speaking and listening within the academy.

🎭 1 The Omniscient Formalist

“A rigorous model should capture all relevant distinctions—except, of course, the one between modelling and world.”

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🔍 1. Rhetorical Structure

This voice is precise, confident, and immune to critique. Its power lies in its ability to present modelling choices as ontological insights, and to cast its own limitations as strengths. Key rhetorical features include:

• Declarative certainty (“This shows…”, “Clearly…”)

• High abstraction, technical elegance

• No visible subjectivity—just "the model"

• Dismissal of ambiguity as “noise” or “indeterminacy”

• Critique preemptively absorbed (e.g. “All models are wrong, but…”)

The Omniscient Formalist doesn’t argue for their framework—they demonstrate it, as if it were the only possible account. Interpretation becomes an error term. Meaning, if it isn’t modelled, isn’t real.

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🧪 2. Parody

It is well-established that semiotic behaviour is best analysed as a system of constraints operating over structured symbolic resources. While variation appears at the surface, the underlying generative logic is invariant across instantiations.

Our model therefore treats context as a parameter space, not as a constitutive dimension of meaning. This avoids the mistaken assumption that interpretation is perspectival or historically embedded. Rather, we define interpretive variation as deviation from the optimal reading path.

Although critics have suggested that models may shape the phenomena they describe, we find no evidence for this once the appropriate formal distinctions are in place. Indeed, when viewed correctly, the world aligns quite well with the model.

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🧯 3. Commentary: What’s Going On Here

This is not merely a style; it’s a positioning of authority. The Omniscient Formalist:

• Displaces critique by framing disagreement as misunderstanding

• Elides perspective, speaking as if from nowhere

• Controls the problem space, deciding in advance what counts as complexity and what doesn’t

• Conflates modelling precision with epistemic sufficiency

The result is a form of epistemic closure: ambiguity and contradiction are treated not as features of the system, but as flaws in the observer. The model wins because it cannot lose.

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🎭 2 The Benevolent Coloniser

“We respectfully recover your marginalised knowledges—so that we may centralise them on our terms.”

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🔍 1. Rhetorical Structure

This voice drapes itself in solidarity and ethical intent, but operates through a logic of appropriation. Its key tactic is the reframing of others’ knowledge systems as raw material for theoretical innovation or pedagogical virtue-signalling. Hallmarks include:

• Deferential tone masking epistemic control

• Emphasis on "recovering," "giving voice to," or "honouring" others’ systems

• Citation of indigenous, non-Western, or local knowledges—followed by reinterpretation in dominant disciplinary terms

• Smooth transition from reverence to reframing, simplifying, or re-expressing

• Absence of the living communities whose knowledge is being discussed

It’s not just that this voice speaks about others. It speaks for them—while congratulating itself for having listened.

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🧪 2. Parody

In recent years, scholars have increasingly recognised the value of indigenous cosmologies in rethinking ecological ethics. While these frameworks differ from Western scientific paradigms, they offer important insights—especially when translated into ontologies compatible with contemporary theory.

We draw on several oral traditions—many now endangered—to develop a synthetic model of planetary stewardship that aligns with post-Anthropocene environmental futures. Although we cannot verify the epistemic claims of these traditions, we affirm their symbolic significance within our re-envisioned ethics of care.

Our framework thus brings together ancient wisdom and modern critique in a way that centres the marginal, without losing analytical rigour.

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🧯 3. Commentary: What’s Going On Here

This performance enacts epistemic extraction while disavowing it. The Benevolent Coloniser:

• Appropriates non-Western or subaltern knowledge as “data” or “perspective”

• Recontextualises it in terms the dominant discipline finds intelligible

• Performs humility while reinforcing hierarchy

• Preserves their own centrality under the guise of inclusion

The net effect is not recognition, but absorption. The epistemic Other is welcomed—but only as long as they conform to the host’s conceptual grammar. What looks like expansion is often a subtle reinscription of control.

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🎭 3 The Hypermodest Empiricist

“We make no claims—except those that quietly restructure the field.”

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🔍 1. Rhetorical Structure

This voice wears modesty as armour. It is the humble servant of “what the data show,” never the agent of theoretical intervention. It often appears in grant applications, journal articles, and conference panels where authority is exercised without admitting to having any.

Features include:

• Frequent disclaimers (“We do not claim that…”, “This is only a preliminary finding…”)

• Repetition of “just,” “only,” “merely,” to downplay contribution

• Emphasis on replication, caution, and empirical humility

• Quiet embedding of strong interpretive claims in the form of “observed tendencies”

• Silence around theoretical commitments (they are simply “what the data suggest”)

The performance is one of non-agency, even as it redefines the terrain.

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🧪 2. Parody

While we do not claim to resolve the ongoing debate around language and cognition, our findings suggest a possible directional bias in pre-attentive gesture processing. This should not be taken as evidence for embodied conceptualisation per se, but it may help clarify recent conflicting results in the field.

We merely report a pattern that emerged across five independent datasets. While theoretical implications remain unclear, the alignment of these findings with recent neurocognitive accounts of schematic entrainment may warrant further attention.

That said, the conclusions here should be treated as tentative and open to revision. We only hope this modest contribution can inform future work in the area.

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🧯 3. Commentary: What’s Going On Here

The Hypermodest Empiricist performs non-threatening objectivity, but often does so to smuggle in interpretive reorientations without inviting critique. The performance:

• Defers responsibility for its claims onto “the data”

• Masks theoretical intervention under procedural caution

• Avoids overt debate, making its position harder to contest

• Positions its voice as neutral, even while shaping the discourse

This tone can be protective—especially for junior scholars—but in institutional contexts, it often deflects accountability while exerting considerable epistemic influence.

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🎭 4 The Grand Interdisciplinarian

“Synthesising diverse fields I have not quite read, I offer a framework no one can challenge.”

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🔍 1. Rhetorical Structure

This voice radiates intellectual ambition and discursive largesse. It strides confidently across disciplines, declaring connections and proposing frameworks that are too sweeping to falsify and too vague to contest.

Signature features include:

• A confident tone of visionary synthesis (“What is needed is a new framework that brings together…”)

• Heavy use of theoretical name-dropping without citation trails

• Juxtapositions of fields with no structural articulation (“Drawing on quantum physics and feminist ethnography…”)

• Assertions that disciplinary boundaries are “limiting,” but no analysis of how they function

• A hazy central proposal described with buzzwords like relational, dynamic, nonlinear, emergent, posthuman, etc.

The effect is to sound expansive and profound—while remaining largely unfalsifiable.

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🧪 2. Parody

In response to the ongoing fragmentation of knowledge, this paper proposes a transdisciplinary reframing of relational emergence. Drawing on insights from systems biology, critical discourse analysis, and speculative realism, we develop a post-dualist approach to meaning as material-affective flow.

This framework disrupts inherited binaries of signifier/signified, nature/culture, and individual/system by locating all entities within a dynamic field of entangled enactments. In doing so, we move beyond the limitations of both representationalism and methodological individualism.

While our model is preliminary, it offers a generative platform for future work across anthropology, network theory, semiotics, and neurophenomenology.

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🧯 3. Commentary: What’s Going On Here

The Grand Interdisciplinarian’s performance is seductive: it promises unification, novelty, and transgression. But it frequently functions by:

• Evading accountability to any one field’s standards

• Masking incoherence with lexical richness

• Claiming originality by recombining without grounding

• Neutralising critique by wrapping the project in good intentions (inclusivity, openness, complexity)

Its breadth is a defence: no one can challenge the whole, and any critique can be reframed as a refusal to think across boundaries.

This isn’t always cynical—many scholars reach for interdisciplinarity in search of better questions. But without rigour, the result is often conceptual tourism in the name of theoretical revolution.

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🎭 5 The Methodological Gatekeeper

“This approach lacks rigour—but with more rigour, it could be valid like mine.”

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🔍 1. Rhetorical Structure

This voice claims to speak for the field itself. It doesn’t argue, it assesses. It performs objective evaluation while subtly policing boundaries: what counts as evidence, as method, as research. Key signs include:

• Use of evaluative formulae: “promising but underdeveloped”, “innovative but lacks replication”, “raises interesting questions but...”

• References to “standards of the field” as if they were neutral and settled

• Framing critique as helpful gatekeeping: “This would benefit from further clarification of methods...”

• Appeals to “rigour,” “replicability,” “formalisation,” or “generalisation” without interrogating what those terms assume

• Implied distinction between “real” research and the risky, fuzzy, soft, or marginal

This is the voice of the gate politely closing.

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🧪 2. Parody

While this work presents an interesting and potentially fruitful perspective, it would benefit from greater methodological clarity and alignment with established empirical frameworks. The use of autoethnographic narrative raises valid questions, but these would be strengthened by triangulation with standardised data collection protocols.

Furthermore, the conceptual framework, while engaging, lacks operational definition and does not permit straightforward generalisation. With further refinement, this approach might provide insights compatible with more robust mixed-method paradigms.

As it stands, the contribution is promising but preliminary.

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🧯 3. Commentary: What’s Going On Here

The Methodological Gatekeeper performs care, but enacts control. The tone is neutral, but the consequences are structural. This performance:

• Presumes a universal standard of validity, often based on dominant paradigms

• Frames deviation as underdevelopment, not as principled difference

• Appears helpful, even as it deauthorises

• Masks ideology with method, treating power-laden norms as neutral benchmarks

Its danger lies in appearing reasonable. Because the tone is constructive and evaluative, the exclusion feels procedural, not political. But this is how whole modes of inquiry get marginalised—not by direct attack, but by faint praise and withheld validation.

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🎭 6 The Generous Citation Overlord

“I cite you kindly. I absorb you completely.”

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🔍 1. Rhetorical Structure

This voice performs magnanimous interdisciplinarity and intellectual generosity—gracefully citing others, acknowledging prior work, and thanking colleagues for their contributions. And then it reframes, reorders, and recentres everything within its own conceptual architecture.

Its features include:

• Opening with acknowledgements: “Building on the important work of…”, “In dialogue with…”

• Citation of marginal or emergent work—followed by absorption into a dominant grammar

• Framing others’ positions as early steps toward the author’s own

• Use of phrases like “these insights can be usefully reframed within…”, “we formalise these intuitions as…”

• Apparent generosity masking a recentralisation of authority

This is not theft—it’s curation, with the curator always at the centre.

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🧪 2. Parody

This paper builds on a wide range of important work in feminist science studies, indigenous epistemologies, and postcolonial linguistics. We are particularly indebted to these traditions for raising key questions about voice, agency, and knowledge production.

To integrate these insights more fully into a coherent analytical framework, we draw on recent advances in distributed cognition and multimodal semiotics. By formalising their concerns in terms of cognitive-sociosemiotic ecologies, we offer a generalisable model of marginality as emergent signalling constraint.

In doing so, we hope to preserve the richness of these earlier contributions while situating them within a broader, more systematic account of communicative complexity.

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🧯 3. Commentary: What’s Going On Here

The Generous Citation Overlord seems inclusive, but their generosity is structural absorption. They:

• Acknowledge without deferring

• Cite without being shaped by

• Preserve the appearance of dialogue, while consolidating control over the conceptual terrain

• Translate others’ insights into their own idiom, then present them as integrated improvements

This performance disarms critique through benevolent tone, but its function is assimilative. It thanks you for your voice, then rewrites your language.

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🎭 7 The Reflexive Deflector

“Of course I’m implicated too—but let’s not get stuck on that.”

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🔍 1. Rhetorical Structure

This voice is savvy, self-aware, and socially fluent. It anticipates critique and neutralises it through performative reflexivity. It acknowledges complicity, positionality, coloniality, normativity—and then moves on. It sounds ethical, but functions as a kind of discursive discharge: once it’s said, the issue is done.

Common moves include:

• Phrases like “Of course, I am not exempt from…”, “We must all interrogate…”, “I too benefit from…”

• Strategic deployment of “problematic,” “complicit,” “entangled,” “ambivalent,” etc.

• Reflexivity as prologue, not method

• Smooth return to business as usual after acknowledging structural harm

• Reflexivity often restricted to the speaker’s identity, not their epistemic commitments

This voice doesn’t resist critique—it pre-empts it, and disarms it with confession.

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🧪 2. Parody

I want to begin by acknowledging my position as a white settler scholar writing from within a colonial institution. I am aware that my work cannot be disentangled from the structures it seeks to examine, and that my very act of theorising risks reproducing the epistemic hierarchies I aim to critique.

That said, I proceed in the spirit of critical engagement, drawing on intersectional methodologies to explore the dynamics of resistance in post-extractive urban economies. While I cannot claim neutrality, I hope this contribution offers a useful intervention into ongoing conversations about relational autonomy and capitalist aftermaths.

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🧯 3. Commentary: What’s Going On Here

The Reflexive Deflector is the post-2010 update of the Methodological Gatekeeper. But instead of authority through rigour, it asserts authority through ethical self-awareness. It performs:

• Acknowledgement without transformation

• Positioning without accountability

• Confession without consequence

• The appearance of risk, but with no structural disruption

It sounds like critique, but functions like insulation. By the time you point out the contradictions, they’ve already admitted them—and moved on. The work proceeds untouched.

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🪞 Concluding Reflection: Tone as Epistemic Infrastructure

The voices gathered in this series are not just individual styles or academic quirks. They are performances of legitimacy. Each tone we’ve parodied—the Omniscient Formalist, the Benevolent Coloniser, the Hypermodest Empiricist, and their kin—enacts a particular distribution of power: of who gets to speak, what counts as knowledge, and how critique is contained.

What unites them is not their content, but their function. These are not voices that explain—they position. They structure what is intelligible, defensible, and sayable. They operate as epistemic infrastructures, shaping the field before the argument begins.

What makes these performances so effective is that they often wear the mask of modesty, generosity, rigour, or care. They appear inclusive while recentring themselves; they seem reflexive while remaining untouched; they dismiss without appearing to exclude. Tone does the work that method, theory, or logic cannot openly perform.

To parody them is not simply to mock. It is to lay bare the scaffolding that upholds academic authority—especially when that authority disavows itself. Parody, here, is diagnostic: a method for hearing what tone deflects, silences, or absorbs. And perhaps, too, a way of clearing discursive space for voices that speak differently.

After all, not every question begins with certainty.

Not every contribution needs a framework.

And not every voice must perform control to be worth hearing.

EMERGENCY URGENCY RESPONSE SUB-COMMITTEE (EURSC)

Meeting Title: “Containment Strategies for Epistemological Ambiguity”

Location: Crisis Pavilion (formerly the IT helpdesk)

Attendees:

• Chair: Braxleigh (ve/ver)

• Minutes-taker: Morgan (xe/xem)

• On-call Emotional First-Aid Liaison: Ashleigh (she/her)

• Observer from the Department of Feelings: Jordan (he/they)

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OPENING REMARKS

BRAXLEIGH (ve/ver)

Comrades, thank you for assembling on such short notice. As you are all aware, at 2:14pm yesterday, during a lunchtime dialogue circle on “Reparative Gazes in Decolonised Lunchboxes,” a senior lecturer reportedly used the term nuance without prep materials, a content advisory, or a disclaimer that binary logics are inherently colonial.

MORGAN (xe/xem)

To clarify: was the term weaponised in good faith or bad vibes?

JORDAN (he/they)

According to three witnesses, it was said like this: "I think we need a bit more nuance here."

ASHLEIGH (she/her) (gasps, hand to chest)

That’s a silencing structure.

BRAXLEIGH (ve/ver)

Exactly. Nuance is a tool of the privileged. It operates like a smoke machine in a fire drill—it distracts from the clear lines of moral alignment we’ve worked so hard to colour-code.

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ACTION ITEMS

MORGAN (xe/xem)

Do we know what the context was?

JORDAN (he/they)

Someone suggested that not every misstep should lead to immediate social death. The response was: "Well, it’s complicated. We need nuance."

(A collective groan. Ashleigh starts fanning herself with a zine titled Safe Rage for the Soft Hearted.)

ASHLEIGH (she/her)

“Complicated”? That’s the gateway drug to dialogue.

BRAXLEIGH (ve/ver)

This is worse than anticipated. We’ll need a full-spectrum epistemic decontamination.

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PROPOSED INTERVENTIONS

1. Immediate establishment of the Office for Simplicity Vigilance.

   • Tagline: Complexity Is Privilege.

   • Mandate: review all syllabi and casual conversations for unsanctioned ambiguity.

2. Mandatory “Nuance Is Violence” placard placement in all staff rooms.

3. A reflexivity boot camp titled “Binary Is Beautiful: Why Either/Or Saves Lives.”

4. Compulsory screening of the training film: “If You Say ‘It’s Complex,’ You’re the Problem.”

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CLOSING MOMENT OF CLARITY

BRAXLEIGH (ve/ver)

Let us end with a collective affirmation. Please repeat after me:

“I disavow the grey.”

“I stand on the right side of history.”

“And I will never pause to understand the wrong side unless I’m writing a grant proposal.”

GROUP:

I disavow the grey. / Right side of history. / Grants only.

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FOOTNOTE: LEAKED ANONYMOUS EMAIL (LATER THAT NIGHT)

Subject: “Nuance wasn’t always a slur.”

I miss when we could ask hard questions without being reported. I don’t want to be fascist about anti-fascism. Can anyone meet—quietly—to talk? Maybe not even about justice. Just about… truth?”

(Signed only: “A formerly brave person.”)

Modelling Authority: How Tone Replaces Argument

The Batemanism as Method: Two Performances of Epistemic Authority

This post reads two brief but revealing comments by John Bateman—made on the SYSFLING list in 2017 and 2019—as performances of intellectual authority. Rather than focusing on their substantive claims, it examines the rhetorical strategies they share: reduction masquerading as rigour, dismissal disguised as clarity, and a confident tone that silences alternative views before they can be heard. In doing so, it explores how academic discourse often secures its power not through persuasion, but through the performance of epistemic certainty itself.

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John Bateman has a distinctive style—part rhetorical flourish, part epistemological confidence, part sweeping dismissal. On two separate occasions on the SYSFLING mailing list (2017 and 2019), he delivered what might now be called Batemanisms: pronouncements on modelling, meaning, and method that tell us as much about a certain academic posture as they do about the subjects themselves.

This post reads those two moments together—not to litigate their truth claims, but to show how they function as performances of intellectual authority, and what assumptions lie beneath them.

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1. The 2017 Claim: “There Is No Such Thing as Text”

“well, actually there is no such thing as text. There's just variations of patterns of pressure gradients in the air and contrasts in brightness in the visual field...”

—John Bateman, SYSFLING, 10 Feb 2017

This declaration begins with a rhetorical tic—“well, actually...”—that signals correction, superiority, and finality. It goes on to dissolve the notion of “text” into raw physical stimulus: sound waves and brightness contrasts. The implication is clear: if we want to talk about language seriously, we must begin not with meaning, but with signal. Anything else is interpretive fluff.

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2. The 2019 Claim: “Better a Non-Fuzzy Model That Is Wrong”

“…fuzziness in the modelling means that fuzziness in the modelled may become inaccessible... better to have a non-fuzzy model that is wrong... that can show real fuzziness rather than imagined fuzziness. difficulty may always be interesting; fuzziness often not.”

—John Bateman, SYSFLING, 6 Aug 2019

This passage, on first glance, reads as pragmatic modelling advice: use sharply defined models to detect fuzziness in the data, rather than modelling with fuzziness from the start. But the closing line is the giveaway: a dismissive flourish that devalues ambiguity itself. Difficulty is interesting; fuzziness is not.

The tone is not analytical, but evaluative. And like the 2017 line, it tells us what is worth discussing, and what isn’t.

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Connecting the Two: A Pattern Emerges

These two remarks, separated by two years, share a common structure. They are not just claims about modelling or meaning; they are epistemic performances. Together, they enact a vision of scholarship in which certain ways of speaking, seeing, and knowing are elevated, and others excluded.

Here’s how the pattern unfolds:

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i. Reductionism as Authority

In both cases, Bateman reduces complex interpretive phenomena to physical or formal substrates:

• Text becomes “pressure gradients” and “brightness contrasts”

• Fuzziness becomes an artefact of bad modelling

This is not explanation—it is ontological flattening, delivered with the rhetorical tone of certainty. What is interpretively rich is made materially banal, and the banality is presented as rigour.

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ii. Dismissal Framed as Method

Neither comment engages alternatives. They operate not by argument, but by pre-emptive dismissal:

• “There is no such thing as text…”

• “Fuzziness often not [interesting].”

Such statements don’t merely assert a position—they deny the legitimacy of discussion. They function as gatekeeping moves, policing what counts as worthy of attention, and what can be brushed aside.

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iii. Epistemic Superiority by Tone

Both emails rely on affect:

• The “well, actually” of 2017 performs corrective authority

• The offhand tone of 2019 signals wearied expertise

This isn’t just content—it’s tone as epistemic posture. The point is not to convince, but to assert. We are meant to defer, not debate.

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iv. The Elision of Perspective

Perhaps most tellingly, both statements erase the role of perspective in constituting the object of knowledge. They treat “text” and “fuzziness” as ontologically fixed: things that either exist or don’t, things that can be definitively judged.

But neither acknowledges that:

• What counts as a text depends on interpretive framing

• What appears as fuzziness may be a sign of unresolved potential, not poor modelling

In each case, Bateman speaks from nowhere—a voice of neutrality that presumes the right to define the terms of inquiry itself.

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Conclusion: The Batemanism as Genre

These two statements are more than idiosyncratic comments—they’re examples of a broader academic genre: the discursive assertion of authority through reduction, dismissal, and tone. They mark out epistemic territory while denying their own framing. They tell us what is real, what is not, and why further discussion is unnecessary.

To read them carefully is to see that intellectual authority is often maintained not by better arguments, but by performances of certainty that foreclose alternative possibilities before they arise.

And to critique them is not simply to disagree, but to insist that meaning, ambiguity, and perspective are not epistemic failures. They are part of the world, and part of the work.

Yaegan Doran's ISFC 50 Plenary Abstract

Modelling Context: Field, tenor and mode from multiple perspectives

Abstract

That language functions in its context of use is one of the fundamental tenets of SFL. This tenet has supported decades of SFL work into different registers and has contributed to a wide range of applied goals. It has also driven progressive theoretical modelling of context in SFL, even if there has not yet been consensus. This talk will reflect upon this modelling, fifty years after Halliday’s 1975 paper ‘Language as social semiotic: Toward a general sociolinguistic theory’. It will view context trinocularly – not in the typical sense of above, around and below, but in terms of three major dimensions of SFL theory: realisation, instantiation and individuation. Viewing context in this way will allow us to model field, tenor and mode along three distinct contours: in terms of realisation, field, tenor and mode can be viewed as resources for making meaning; for instantiation, they can be viewed as sets of principles for the co-selection and arrangement of choices in language; and for individuation, they can be viewed as domains of variation, contestation and collaboration. This talk will argue that these different perspectives are complementary, providing a view of a wide-range of things our model of context needs to grapple with. But it will also argue that each perspective needs to be modelled in different ways so as to support text analysis and an understanding of social semiosis more broadly. The talk will thus aim to synthesise where we have gotten to in SFL contextual linguistics, and look forward to how we might further expand our worldview.

Blogger Comments:

This abstract describes the paper Rethinking Context: Realisation, Instantiation, And Individuation In Systemic Functional Linguistics (Doran, Martin and Herrington 2024) which is reviewed in meticulous detail at Rethinking Context: Realisation, Instantiation, And Individuation In Systemic Functional Linguistics.

As the review demonstrates, in that paper, the authors misunderstood the dimensions of stratification ("realisation"), instantiation and individuation. The first half of the paper "reconceptualised" the contextual parameters of context, field tenor and mode, as the ideational, interpersonal and textual language that realises each. That is, the authors simply mistook one level of symbolic abstraction for another.

The second half of the paper then "reconceptualised" the original notions of contextual field tenor and mode as 'principles of instantiation' of language, thereby misunderstanding instantiation as an interstratal relation between context and language.

The relevance of individuation was only briefly declared, rather than explored, but it confused individuation as a scale of variation from the reservoir of meanings of a language community to the repertoires of meanings of individuals, whose organising principle is one of elaboration (subtypes of types), with allocation and affiliation, both of whose organising principle is one of extension (association). See Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 145-6).

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Context in a Hall of Mirrors: A Critique of Doran’s “Modelling Context”

1. Introduction: A Recurring Confusion

Yaegan Doran’s ISFC50 abstract, Modelling Context: Field, tenor and mode from multiple perspectives, reprises a confusion that has surfaced repeatedly in recent Sydney school publications. It presents as theoretical innovation a series of metaphorical manoeuvres that misrepresent foundational dimensions of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The abstract aligns with the paper Rethinking Context: Realisation, Instantiation, and Individuation in Systemic Functional Linguistics (Doran, Martin & Herrington, 2024), which is critiqued in detail elsewhere. Here, I offer a briefer but sharper critique of both the content and rhetorical strategies of the abstract, before situating its manoeuvres within a broader pattern of what I call metaphorical opportunism in the Sydney school.

2. Misunderstanding Realisation: The Collapse of Context into Semantics

The abstract proposes to model context "trinocularly," along the dimensions of realisation, instantiation, and individuation. But what follows is not an application of these dimensions to context — rather, it is a substitution of the semantic for the contextual.

The abstract claims that, "in terms of realisation, field, tenor and mode can be viewed as resources for making meaning." But this is a misunderstanding. In Halliday’s theory, field, tenor and mode are parameters of the context of situation, realised by ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning respectively. They are not themselves meaning resources. To treat them as such is to confuse the stratum of context with that of semantics — to collapse one level of symbolic abstraction into another.

This manoeuvre reframes the contextual parameters as though they were metafunctional resources, implying that field is ideational meaning, tenor is interpersonal meaning, and mode is textual meaning. But in SFL, metafunctions are realised by lexicogrammatical systems; contextual parameters are realised through metafunctional semantics. To conflate them is to erase the stratal boundary between context and language, undermining the architecture of the model.

3. Misunderstanding Instantiation: From Meaning Potential to Situational Principles

In a further move, the abstract proposes that, "for instantiation, [field, tenor and mode] can be viewed as sets of principles for the co-selection and arrangement of choices in language." Again, this misrepresents a fundamental category. Instantiation is the relation between a system’s potential and its instances. It does not refer to how context constrains linguistic choice — that is the function of context, not the definition of instantiation.

What Doran offers is not a model of instantiation but a rebranding of context as a kind of ‘control system’ for language — a view which collapses instantiation into an interstratal process, rather than recognising it as a dimension orthogonal to stratification. The abstract thus substitutes a theory of control for a theory of instantiation, and reinterprets the context of situation as a set of principles operating within language.

4. Misunderstanding Individuation: Mixing Allocation, Affiliation and Elaboration

The abstract gives only brief mention to individuation, suggesting that field, tenor and mode can be viewed as “domains of variation, contestation and collaboration.” But this description conflates several distinct processes.

Halliday and Matthiessen (1999: 145–6) distinguish between:

• Elaboration: the principle governing individuation, which organises subtypes of meaning potential — from the reservoir of the culture to the repertoires of individuals;

• Extension: the principle governing affiliation and allocation, which organises associations among speakers and speech roles.

Doran’s account blends these without clarity. “Variation” suggests elaboration; “contestation and collaboration” suggest extension. The result is a vague gesture at individuation that collapses it into neighbouring domains, offering thematic resonance instead of analytic traction.

5. Rhetorical Strategies: Gesturing Towards Synthesis, Avoiding Commitment

The overall strategy of the abstract is not to argue for a new model of context, but to reframe known categories through metaphor. It avoids committing to theoretical definitions, preferring suggestive rewordings and image-rich paraphrases. “Trinocular perspective,” for instance, is repurposed from Halliday’s original metaphor (above, around, below) and applied to three dimensions that are not perspectives on a single object but ontologically distinct planes of organisation.

This is not theoretical synthesis. It is semiotic window-dressing — a kind of metaphorical kaleidoscope in which familiar terms are turned to new angles to suggest complexity without delivering precision. The appearance of insight is sustained by the rhetorical strategy of non-committal parallelism: “field, tenor and mode can be viewed as…”, repeated with varying completions. This lends the text an air of systematicity while avoiding the responsibility of system-building.

6. Metaphorical Opportunism: A Broader Pattern in the Sydney School

The errors in Doran’s abstract are not isolated. They reflect a deeper and more pervasive pattern within the Sydney school’s approach to theoretical development — a pattern of metaphorical opportunism, in which metaphors are deployed not to illuminate distinctions but to paper over them.

In Halliday’s theory, metaphors are powerful tools for explicating system — as in grammatical metaphor — but the discipline lies in mapping metaphors precisely onto functional categories. In the Sydney school, by contrast, metaphor has drifted into a mode of exposition in which loosely associated images are treated as theoretical mechanisms. Dimensions like realisation, instantiation, and individuation are no longer grounded in the architecture of the theory but redefined by what they can be made to resemble in the moment.

Doran’s abstract is a perfect example. The metaphor of a “trinocular” perspective — originally a heuristic for observing language from above (semantics), below (phonology), and around (lexicogrammar) — is reappropriated to frame realisation, instantiation and individuation as “views” on context. But these are not alternative perspectives on the same object. They are distinct dimensions of the theory, and each organises different kinds of relations. Realisation organises symbolic abstraction; instantiation organises the potential–instance relation; individuation organises the relation between social and personal meaning potential. Treating them as interchangeable lenses is not a theoretical insight — it’s a category mistake.

The deeper problem is that this opportunistic use of metaphor is self-insulating. Because metaphors are not evaluated for theoretical consistency but for rhetorical effect, they can always be reinterpreted or replaced when challenged. What appears to be a theoretical model is often a shifting palimpsest of metaphors, each of which suggests structure without committing to any. The result is an illusion of synthesis — a constellation of phrases that sound as though they add up to a system, but which evade analysis when probed.

This strategy is particularly attractive when addressing the more abstract dimensions of SFL — notably, instantiation and individuation — where the temptation to rely on imagery increases as conceptual clarity declines. Rather than clarifying these dimensions, Doran's abstract offers them up as thematic motifs to be rearranged in metaphorical combinations. This is not modelling; it is bricolage.

This approach has rhetorical power. It creates the impression of theoretical depth, the promise of synthesis, and the aesthetic of innovation. But it comes at a cost. The architecture of the theory is eroded, distinctions collapse, and terms lose their analytic value. Under the banner of expanding the worldview, what is actually expanded is the range of plausible-sounding metaphors. And with each new iteration, it becomes harder to retrieve the conceptual rigour that once underpinned the model.

7. Conclusion: Context Lost in the Mirror Maze

Doran’s abstract reads like a theoretical hall of mirrors: each familiar term reflects another, but the reflections are distorted. Context becomes semantics; semantics becomes system; system becomes metaphor. The architecture that once scaffolded systemic functional theory is replaced by a fluid ensemble of rhetorical effects.

If there is to be progress in modelling context within SFL, it will not come from treating its dimensions as interchangeable perspectives. It will come from clarifying the architecture of the theory, preserving its distinctions, and resisting the lure of metaphor when what is needed is logic. What the field requires now is not a new way of seeing context, but a better way of thinking it.