[8] The Promotion Of The Fawcett Doctrine

Fawcett's general strategy is to present the Cardiff Grammar as complementary to what he terms Halliday's "Sydney Grammar" (Systemic Functional Grammar). This is an appeal to the type of anti-intellectualism that Asimov identified, which, in turn, relies on community members not knowing that SFL is a scientific theory (or knowing what being a scientific theory entails).

In truth, however, under the cover of this strategy, Fawcett presents his model, not as complementary to SFL Theory ('X and Y'), but as the preferred alternative ('X or Y'). For example, the following misleading comments on Halliday & Matthiessen (1999), made on the Sysfling list on 29 June 2011, are typical:

Indeed, if Michael Halliday and Christian Matthiessen had formed a clear view of the way in which the choices described in their Construing Experience through Meaning determine the choices in the major system networks of the lexicogrammar, they would surely have said so in that book. I have looked hard for a section that makes this connection, but I have yet to find it. This suggests that the model proposed there is simply one possible, half-complete hypothesis that needs to be subject to the normal process in science of development, testing, evaluation, revision (or rejection), retesting, re-evaluation, and so on.

More to the point, in his major statement on his model, A Theory Of Syntax For Systemic Functional Linguistics (Fawcett 2000, 2010), Fawcett devotes only 3 of its 12 chapters to outlining the Cardiff Grammar in any detail, while all 12 chapters feature arguments against Fawcett's own misleading misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Systemic Functional Grammar (evidence here). Fawcett even goes so far as to falsely accuse Halliday of intellectual dishonesty (evidence here).

Again, the Dunning-Kruger Effect provides a means of understanding Fawcett's behaviour:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realise it. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast, the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.