Saturday 25 June 2016

The Thoughts Of Hume In Systemic Functional Linguistics [2]

Russell (1961: 635):
H[um]e begins with the distinction between 'impressions' and 'ideas'.  These are two kinds of perceptions, of which impressions are those that have the more force and violence.  'By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning.'  Ideas, at least when simple, are like impressions, but fainter.  'Every simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it; and every simple impression a correspondent idea.'  'All our simple ideas in their first appearance are derived from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.'  Complex ideas, on the other hand, need not resemble impressions.  We can imagine a winged horse without having ever seen one, but the constituents of this idea are all derived from impressions. … Among ideas, those that retain a considerable degree of vivacity of the original impressions belong to memory, the others to imagination.

Blogger Comments:

Through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, Hume's two types of perceptions, impressions and ideas, correspond to the phenomena (things) of mental processes — those of visual perception and cognition, respectively.  Memory and imagination correspond to two types of cognitive mental process.

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