The Metafunctional Conditions of Modelling
The conditions under which we model the categorisable semiotically can be understood through the metafunctional dimensions of meaning-making: the ideational, encompassing the experiential and the logical; the interpersonal; and the textual.
1. Ideational variation: organising experience
Models are located in the space of ideational variation: they are organised through the experience of the categorisable.[1] It is difference in the categorisable that selects the categories through which it may be modelled. This means that models depend on the recognition functionality of the neurological system, including prosthetic technologies that extend its perceptual reach, and on the particular experiential trajectories of individual modellers.
2. Interpersonal variation: organising value
Models are also located in the space of interpersonal variation: they are organised by the value systems that orient the modeller towards particular kinds of experience. The limbic system — shaped by evolutionary pressures on ancestral bodies — biases the modeller towards or away from particular categories by investing them with positive or negative value. As categories become more complex, both through internal differentiation and through semiotic interaction with others, so too do the values attached to them. Models are not neutral systems of classification; they are motivated organisations of categorisation.
3. Textual variation: organising relevance
Finally, models are located in the space of textual variation: they are organised through selective attention to value-laden categories. This includes foregrounding some categories as salient while filtering out others as irrelevant.[2] Some become prominent organising threads in a fabric of meaning, while others remain peripheral or are omitted entirely. Every model, in this sense, is perspectival: it is a way of seeing (Berger 1972), and like all perspectives, it both reveals and obscures. A model is structured by the assumptions it inherits and enacts — its exclusions are as consequential as its inclusions.[3]
Footnotes
[1] The ‘categorisable’ includes not only directly experienced phenomena, but also categorisations of the categorisable, and categorisations of those categorisations, recursively.
[2] Pike famously observed that a theory is like a window that only faces one way.
[3] The influence of perspectival framing on categorisation was illustrated by Rosenhan’s experiment (reported in Slater 2004), in which actors feigned psychiatric symptoms to gain admission to mental institutions and were largely undetected once inside — demonstrating the self-reinforcing bias of diagnostic frames.