The problem is that the linguistic field is a not a hierarchical but a horizontal knowledge structure, in which theories continually threaten to replace each other. The insecurity this breeds feeds an impulse to boundary policing (that your younger staff have experienced). We also have this problem within our SFL sub-field, that would blow up occasionally on this list. (One reason it has gone so quiet in recent years.) My point was that SFL is institutionally vulnerable. For its survival, I think we need to find ways to work against the boundary policing impulse, no matter how logically it is framed.
Blogger Comments:
Appraised
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Appraisal
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Polarity
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Attitude
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boundary policing
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negative
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judgement: propriety
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the deployment of logic
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appreciation: reaction
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Rose, of course, is himself the most zealous and energetic 'boundary policer' in the SFL community; see here.
[1] To be clear, this is a model of academic institutions as social insect colonies, which, according to Halliday, are organised on the basis of value, not semiosis. Here all exchanges of meaning are reduced to merely boundary policing: soldier ants protecting their home colony (or attacking another). Reasoned argument has no place.
[2] This is misleading, because it is untrue, as an examination of the sys-func archives (here) demonstrates. The sub-field Rose refers to is Martin's misunderstandings of SFL Theory. Evidence that they are misunderstandings is presented here (English Text) and here (Working With Discourse). There have been no "blow ups" with regard to the validity of Martin's models on the sys-func list, yet.
[3] Bertrand Russell, in his History Of Western Philosophy (pp 21-2), identifies those who are hostile to science and reason, and explains the motivations for their hostility:
Throughout this long development, from 600 BC to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them. With this difference, others have been associated. The disciplinarians have advocated some system of dogma, either old or new, and have therefore been compelled to be, in greater or lesser degree, hostile to science, since their dogmas could not be proved empirically. They have almost invariably taught that happiness is not the good, but that ‘nobility’ or ‘heroism’ is to be preferred. They have had a sympathy with irrational parts of human nature, since they have felt reason to be inimical to social cohesion. The libertarians, on the other hand, with the exception of the extreme anarchists, have tended to be scientific, utilitarian, rationalistic, hostile to violent passion, and enemies of all the more profound forms of religion. This conflict existed in Greece before the rise of we recognise as philosophy, and is already quite explicit in the earliest Greek thought. In changing forms, it has persisted down to the present day, and no doubt will persist for many ages to come.