The Knowing World: V. The Theory of Experience

We usually think of a theory as something we construct about the world.

First there is experience.

Then, somewhere afterwards, we build a theory to explain it.

But there is another possibility.

Perhaps a theory is not primarily a description of experience. Perhaps it is a structured potential for making experience intelligible.

This is close to what Halliday means when he describes the ideational metafunction as a theory of experience.

A theory, in this sense, is not necessarily a set of propositions.

It is an organisation of distinctions.

It provides possibilities for saying what can count as a thing, an event, a relation, a process, a circumstance. It makes some differences available as significant differences, and connects them so that further distinctions become possible.

Experience does not arrive already divided into these categories.

Nor are the categories simply imposed upon an otherwise featureless world.

Rather, a system of distinctions provides a potential through which what happens can become articulate.

This gives the word theory a rather different meaning.

A theory is not merely something we know about experience.

It is part of what makes experience knowable as something.

And this means that a theory is always more than its individual instances.

The system provides a potential for construing what happens. The instance is what occurs when some of that potential is taken up.

But the movement can also go the other way.

An instance may reveal something the system could not quite accommodate. It may confirm an existing distinction, expose its limits, or require a new one.

The system makes the instance intelligible.

The instance can make the system change.

Perhaps, then, theory is not the opposite of experience.

It is the organised potential through which experience can become meaningful—and through which experience can, in turn, transform the potential that made it intelligible.

The theory of experience is therefore not standing outside experience, looking in.

It is already part of the world becoming articulate.

And that leaves us with a deceptively simple question:

What happens when a theory meets an instance?