Academics From England

"# A design principle based on the redundancy of functions rather than on the redundancy of parts (Emery, 1967) characterized the underlying organizational philosophy which tended to develop multiple skills in the individual and immensely increase the response repertoire of the group."

"Faced with low productivity despite improved equipment, and with drift from the pits despite both higher wages and better amenities... a point seems to have been reached where the [coal] industry is in a mood to question a method it has taken for granted."

"Every time the cycle is stopped, some 200 tons of coal are lost. So close is the task interdependence that the system becomes vulnerable from its need for 100 percent performance at each step."

"The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent."

"To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific."

"It's evident that Darwin saw evolution not as progressive or improving, but as an activity that happens moment by moment. From this it is clear that evolution has no plan. It has neither memory nor foresight. No vestige of cosmic strivings from some remote beginning; no prospect of revelatory culmination in some transcendent end."

"There is more genetic variation in a few troupes of wild chimpanzees than in the entire human population. Lack of genetic variation is never good for species survival."

"[O]ver the past few decades, the quality of human sperm has declined massively... Pollution... is one possible factor. Another might be stress... triggered by living in close proximity..."

"The cause of extinction is usually a delayed reaction to habitat loss. ...H. sapiens might ...already be a dead species walking."

"[T]he human population is set not just for shrinkage but collapse—and soon. To paraphrase Lehrer, if we are going to write about human extinction, we’d better start writing now."

"The founder of systemic-functional linguistics, Michael Halliday pioneered the analysis of language in its social context. He convincingly reestablished the centrality of meaning in understanding how language functions after the domination of linguistic research by CHOMSKY's generative grammar model."

"In 1978, Michael halliday wrote Language as Social Semiotic, which revolutionized the way that we think about language in context"

"[A register is constituted by] the linguistic features which are typically associated with a configuration of situational features - with particular values of the field, mode and tenor."

"[Register] is set of meanings, the configuration of semantic patterns, that are typically drawn upon under the specified conditions, along with the words and structures that are used in the realization of these meanings."

"What makes learning possible is that the coding imposed by the mother tongue corresponds to a possible mode of perception and interpretation of the environment. A green car can be analysed experientially as carness qualified by greenness, if that is the way the system works."

"The interpersonal function [of language] is the function “to establish, maintain, and specify relations between members of societies”"

"The theme is what is being talked about, the point of departure for the clause as message, and the speaker has within certain limits the option of selecting any element in the clause as thematic."

"Language... is a range of possibilities, and an open end set of options in behavior that are available to the individual in his existence as social man. The context of culture is the environment of any particular selection that is made within them... The context of culture defines the potential, the range of possibilities that are open. The actual choice among these possibilities takes place within a given context of situation."

"Foregrounding, as I understand it, is prominence that is motivated"

"[interpersonal meaning] embodies all use of language to express social and personal relations, including all forms of the speaker's intrusion into the speech situation and the speech act."

"In the relative orientation of different social groups towards the various functions of language in given contexts and towards the different areas of meaning that may be explored within a given function"

"The grammatical system has … a functional input and a structural output; it provides the mechanism for different functions to be combined in one utterance"

"… language has evolved in the service of particular human needs … what is really significant is that this functional principle is carried over and built into the grammar, so that the internal organization of the grammar system is also functional in character."

"I see it as part of the development of the field. I would always emphasize how much I share with other linguists: I've never either felt particularly distinct or wanted to be distinct. I never saw myself as a theorist; I only became interested in theory, in the first place, because, in the theoretical approaches that I had access to, I didn't find certain areas developed enough to enable me to explore the questions that I was interested in."

"A physical system is just that: a physical system. What is systematized is matter itself, and the processes in which the system is realized are also material. But a biological system is more complex: it is both biological and physical — it is matter with the added component of life; and a social system is more complex still: it is physical, and biological, with the added component of social order, or value. … A semiotic system is still one step further in complexity: it is physical, and biological, and social —and also semiotic: what is being systematized is meaning. In evolutionary terms, it is a system of the fourth order of complexity"

"The human sciences have to assume at least an equal responsibility in establishing the foundations of knowledge."

"[The construal of context as a semiotic construct accompanies the construal of language as a metafunctionally organized system because of the realizational relationship between the two. And it is this relationship which helps to explain how language is learned:] It is this that enables, and disposes, the child to learn the lexicogrammar: since the system is organized along functional lines, it relates closely to what the child can see language doing as he observes it going on around him."

"[... language, as an example of a semiotic system, contains all four levels of organization as follows:] First, it is transmitted physically, by sound waves traveling through the air; secondly, it is produced and received biologically, by the human brain and its associated organs of speech and hearing; thirdly it is exchanged socially, in contexts set up and defined by the social structure; and fourthly it is organized semiotically as a system of meanings"

"We should not, perhaps, take it for granted that a description in terms of a formalised model, which has certain properties lacking in those derived from models of another kind, will necessarily be the best description for all of the very diverse purposes for which the descriptions of languages are needed. In assessing the value of a description, it is reasonable to ask whether it has proved useful for the purposes for which it was intended."

"Saussure took the sign as the organizing concept for linguistic structure, using it to express the conventional nature of language in the phrase "l'arbitraire du signe". This has the effect of highlighting what is, in fact, the one point of arbitrariness in the system, namely the phonological shape of words, and hence allows the non-arbitrariness of the rest to emerge with greater clarity. An example of something that is distinctly non-arbitrary is the way different kinds of meaning in language are expressed by different kinds of grammatical structure, as appears when linguistic structure is interpreted in functional terms."

"It is part of the task of linguistics to describe texts, and all texts, including those prose or verse, which fall within any definition of literature and are accessible to analysis by the existing methods of linguistics."

"A child learning his [her] mother tongue is learning how to name; he [she] is building up a meaning potential in respect of a limited number of social functions. These functions [instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, and imaginative] constitute the semiotic environment of a very small child, and may be thought of as universals of human culture"

"A root definition describing a notional system chosen for its relevance to what the investigator and/or people in the problem situation perceive as matters of contention."

"Systems thinking, as written about and practiced by Russell Ackoff, C. West Churchman, Peter Checkland and others, contained within it many of the impulses that motivate the application of design ideas to strategy, organization, society, and management. Ideas such as engaging a broad set of stakeholders, moving beyond simple metrics and calculations, considering idealized options and using scenarios to explore them, shifting boundaries to reframe problems, iteration, the liberal use of diagrams and rich pictures, and tirelessly searching for a better set of alternatives were all there. If the business and management community had bought it, we would not be having the many discussions about design, design thinking, and expanding management education to engage the intuitive, to embrace values, to look beyond available choices."

"Traditionally, grammar has always been a grammar of written language: and it has always been a product grammar" ['Product' is here used as one term of the Hjelmslevian pair process/product.] A process/product distinction is a relevant one for linguists because it corresponds to that between our experience of speech and our experience of writing: writing exists whereas speech happens."

"In an unrestricted science such as biology or geology, the effects under study are so complex that designed experiments with controls are often not possible. Quantitative models are more vulnerable and the chance of unknown factors dominating the observations is much greater."

"Any text in spoken English is organized into what may be called 'information units'. (...) this is not determined (...) by constituent structure. Rather could it be said that the distribution of information specifies a distinct structure on a different plan. (...) Information structure is realized phonologically by 'tonality', the distribution of the text into tone groups."

"In a certain sense human activity systems do not exist, only perceptions of them exist, perceptions which are associated with specific Ws."

"The core of a root definition of a system will be a transformation process (T), the means by which defined inputs are transformed into defined outputs. The transformation will include the direct object of the main activity verbs subsequently required to describe the system."

"Making drawings to indicate the many elements in any human situation is something which has characterized SSM from the start. Its rationale lies in the fact that the complexity of human affairs is always a complexity of multiple interacting relationships; and pictures are a better medium than linear prose for expressing relationships. Pictures can be taken in as a whole and help to encourage holistic rather than reductionist thinking about a situation."

"A methodology will lack the precision of a technique but will be a firmer guide to action than a philosophy. Where a technique tells you 'how' and a philosophy tells you 'what', a methodology will contain elements of both 'what' and 'how'."

"We have no aces to what the world is, to ontology, only to descriptions of the world... that is to say, epistemology... We should never say something in the world: 'it is a system'; only: "it may be described as a system'."

"We reduce the complexity of the variety of the world in experiments whose results are validated by their repeatability, and we may build knowledge by the refutation of hypotheses."

"Cursory inspection of the world suggests it is a giant complex with dense connections between its parts. We cannot cope with it in that form and are forced to reduce it to some separate areas which we can examine separately'. .."

"The text is a product in the sense that it is an output, something that can be recorded and studied, having a certain construction that can be represented in systematic terms. It is a process in the sense of a continuous process of semantic choice, a movement through the network of meaning potential, with each set of choices constituting the environment for a further set."

"The concept of action research arises in the behavioural sciences and is obviously applicable to an examination of human activity systems carried out through the process of attempting to solve problems. This core is the idea that the researcher does not remain an observer outside the subject of investigation but becomes a participant in the relevant human group. The researcher becomes a participant in the action, and the process of change itself becomes the subject of research. In action research the roles of researcher and subject are obviously not fixed: the roles of the subject and the practitioner are sometimes switched: the subjects become researchers... and researchers become men of action."

"The trick is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience—but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm."

"The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called Montaigne a writer who put “a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.”"

"As Seneca put it, life does not pause to remind you that it is running out. The only one who can keep you mindful of this is you."

"Knowing that the life that remained to him could not be of great length, he said, “I try to increase it in weight, I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it. … The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.”"