...well, it’s been 30 years so far since ET. But is resolution or refutation really necessary? A model is valid if it works, according to Popper and MAKH. Maybe we should just be looking at differences in appliability, and labelling models by those criteria, or by internal features that afford them.
Keeping in mind that the lexicogrammar is at the base of every model. Then perhaps the grammatico-semantic model is good for large scale statistical analyses of corpora as RH pioneered, while the discourse semantic model is good for metafunctional analyses of text structuring.
Blogger Comments:
[1] This is misleading, because it is untrue. As a logician, Popper ascribed validity to arguments, not to scientific theories. Nor did Popper regard scientific theories as verifiable. Theories remain provisionally corroborated while experiments fail to falsify them.
[2] Here Rose is actually deploying the logical fallacy that Popper drew specific attention to:
If A then P;P;Therefore A.
Popper's point is that, if theory A predicts phenomenon P, and phenomenon P is observed through experiment, this does not prove that theory A is true. That is, just as the appliability of the Ptolemaic model of the solar system did not prove that model true, the appliability of Martin's model does not prove his model "valid".
Importantly, Martin's stratification model is not falsifiable by experiment, and so, is not scientific in Popperian terms. Moreover, it is invalidated by its own internal contradictions, as demonstrated elsewhere on this blog and here.
[3] To be clear, the 'grammatico-semantic' model is Halliday's model of the semantics that the lexicogrammar construes. The discourse semantic model, on the other hand, is Martin's (1992) rebranding of Halliday's lexicogrammatical systems of cohesion and semantic system of speech function. Evidence here.
