17. Metafunctional Consistency In Meaning-Making

One aspect of “truth”[1] is consistency in meaning-making, and given the metafunctional dimensions of meaning-making, this entails metafunctional consistency in meaning-making: experiential, logical, interpersonal and textual.[2] To be ideationally consistent in meaning-making is to be consistent both in the representation of experience and in the logical relations said to obtain between representations of experience.[3] To be interpersonally consistent in meaning-making is to be consistent in the values given to — the stance taken on — ideational meanings. To be textually consistent in meaning-making is to be consistent in what is attended to as relevant with regard to ideational and interpersonal meanings.  Different consistencies — including tensions between construals of experience, values inherent in construals, and attentions paid to construals — creates diversity in modelling. 

Footnotes:

[1] The word ‘truth’ is a noun formed from the adjective ‘true’, which construes it metaphorically as an abstract thing in itself rather than congruently as a description of relations between things. 

[2] From interpersonal and textual perspectives, ideational distinctions are a means of elaborating what is valued and focussed upon. 

[3] The word ‘real’ is often used to mean ideationally true, but it is often also extended to mean that the specific categorisations of the description exist as properties of the perceivable, independent of the modelling framework.

ChatGPT revised:

Truth as Metafunctional Consistency

One aspect of what is conventionally called “truth”[1] is consistency in meaning-making. And since meaning-making operates along metafunctional dimensions, this entails metafunctional consistency: consistency across the experiential and logical (together forming the ideational), the interpersonal, and the textual.

To be ideationally consistent is to maintain coherence in the representation of experience and in the logical relations asserted between those representations.[2] This involves both internal consistency (e.g. maintaining consistent categorisations) and external consistency (e.g. aligning relations among representations with broader modelling frameworks).

To be interpersonally consistent is to adopt stances towards meanings — including attitudes, judgements, and value orientations — that are not erratic or self-contradictory across time and context. Here, consistency is not neutrality: it is the maintenance of a patterned evaluative orientation.

To be textually consistent is to attend selectively to ideational and interpersonal meanings in a way that is coherent and patterned: that is, to foreground and background meanings in ways that make sense within a perspective or model. This means attending to what is relevant, in a way that is itself relevant.

Modelling, then, is shaped not just by what is represented, but by how values are assigned and what is attended to. Diversity in modelling emerges not simply from different representations of experience, but from tensions between:
– experiential construals
– interpersonal valuations
– textual patterns of attention

These tensions — and the attempt to resolve or live within them — are what give modelling its creative range.

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Footnotes

[1] The noun truth is derived from the adjective true, abstracting it into an object-like entity — a metaphoric construal. Congruently, true functions to describe a relation among things, rather than as a “thing” in itself.

[2] From the interpersonal and textual perspectives, ideational meanings are not primary but functional: they are the means by which what is valued and what is attended to are elaborated.

[3] The term real is often used to mean ideationally true, but it is also commonly extended to imply that the specific categorisations involved correspond to properties of the perceivable, independent of the modelling framework — an extrapolation that conflates modelling with ontology.