Systemic Functional Linguistics, Semiotics and Philosphy of Organism

In this article I explore some points of possible convergence between systemic functional linguistics (hereafter: SFL), general semiotics (hereafter GS), and a strain of contemporary philosophical thought known as process philosophy or process metaphysics . In doing so I want to suggest some possible points of contact between SFL and some new currents in philosophy that point in some other directions than those that up until now have most commonly been associated with the philosophy of language and linguistic metatheory. In this connection a central figure is Alfred North Whitehead, the British philosopher, mathematician and logician who is probably best known for his work together with Bertrand Russell on symbolic logic, which as published as Principia Mathematica . What is probably less well known for many is that Whitehead, in the wake of Principia came to diverge in his philosophical interests from Russell, and went on to develop a speculative philosophy that he named Philosophy of Organism, and which has also, for reasons that will become apparent later, also came to be known as process philosophy.This is then a metatheoretical, or metasemiotic, discourse designed to construe SFL in dialogical terms, not only in relation to the science of semiotics envisioned by Saussure (developed subsequently by Hjelmslev and Greimas) in his Cours de linguistique générale of ‘semiology’ when he spoke of the “science that studies the life of signs within society” , but also as a part of the general semiotics as outlined by Eco as a philosophical project that “studies the whole of human signifying activity - languages - and languages are what constitutes human beings as such, that is, as semiotic animals. It studies languages through languages.” Such a systematic philosophical investigation of this kind has “pragmatic” effects in itself, since, as Eco also points out: the very act of asking general questions about the whole of human signifying activity in the present, with reference to its past, is inevitably destined to influence the course of this self-same activity in the future. General semiotics must then be seen as necessarily transforming its own object by the very fact of its basic theoretical assumptions.