You know, we really do agree. It’s just that you say it wrong![1]
By way of introduction, consider nominal groups such as ‘my body’, ‘my brain’, ‘my mind’ and so on. Each of these distinguishes two entities: the entity referenced by the Deictic (possessive adjective) ‘my’, and the entity realised as Thing in each instance: ‘body’, ‘brain’ and ‘mind’. In this way, everyday language construes the language user as distinct from the biological organism, the organs and the processes that are the sine qua non of the language user — when these cease to function, so does the language user — and it is a short step to construing the language user, in the manner of Plato and Descartes, as consisting of a distinct essence or nonmaterial substance (see further below).
But this is not a phenomenon confined only to the language of non-specialists. Consider the following clauses spoken by a professor[2] of physics: ‘thoughts travel through the conscious mind… entered into consciousness… travelled through the mind to the mouth’. Leaving aside the fact that the speaker has identified thoughts with electro-chemical differences propagating along nerve fibres, the prepositional phrases ‘through the conscious mind’, ‘into consciousness’ and ‘through the mind’ realise locations involving entities — as realised by the nominal groups: ‘the conscious mind’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘the mind’.[3] Even if these locations and entities are interpreted as abstract (grammatically metaphorical), rather than concrete (grammatically congruent), such instances can similarly lead easily to the construal of the conscious mind/consciousness/the mind as nonmaterial substance.
In the grammar of the clause, phenomenal experience is construed as a process involving one or more participants, with possible attendant circumstances. Participants in processes are congruently realised by nominal groups, or metaphorically realised by nominalisations. Nominalisations may be lexical, as exemplified by the verb ‘think’ being rendered as the abstract noun ‘thought’, or grammatical, as exemplified by the clause ‘the physicist thought’ being rendered as the nominal group ‘the thinking of the physicist’.[4]
Lexical nominalisations are generally the harder of the two to recognise, especially when their metaphorical status is not signalled by word morphology, as by suffixes like ‘ation’, ‘ness’, ‘ity’, and so on. In the history of ideas, however, taking nouns at face value has been the source of major misconstruals. As mentioned in a previous chapter, the nouns ‘fire’ and ‘life’, for example, construed the phenomena they categorised as things, and much energy was spent trying to determine the substances that composed them, or the essences that characterised them, until the phenomena they categorised were eventually reconstrued as processes.[5]
Footnotes:
[1] Scientist quoted in Dawkins (2004: 506).
[2] Paul Davies speaking on The Science Show 27/8/04 (ABC Radio National). He also asked rhetorically: ‘how can a thought move an arm?’
[3] Typical in this regard are these instances spoken by science journalist Natasha Mitchell on The Science Show 27/8/04 (ABC Radio National): ‘…look into the brain and find consciousness there’; and on All In The Mind 4/9/04 (ABC Radio National): (for people in comas) ‘where does consciousness go?’
[4] For the motivations for nominalisation and its functions, see Halliday (1985b: 72-4).
[5] Like fire and life, heat also used to be thought a substance (a fluid), and so: a thing, but it is now thought to be the random motion of atoms, and so: a process. [Bronowski Ascent of Man: World Within World].