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In Reply to: RE: Variability and context posted by Joe Roberts on September 22, 2015 at 08:16:49
"I am suggesting that a proper investigation of such phenomena must recognize a vast range of variability, between subjects..."
But if the issue under investigation is that a specific person has asserted that he hears the difference in sound when a wire is reversed, it doesn't matter what abilities any other people may or may not have. The person in question has made a definitive statement that he can hear the difference between the two directionalities of the wire. Either he can demonstrate that claimed ability to the outside world in some set of objective tests, or else, for all practical purposes for the rest of the world, his alleged "ability" has no utility, and in fact no meaning, if no test is capable of supporting his claim.
Your sentence I partially quoted above went on to say "...and even for one human subject in different CONTEXTS. Important point, CONTEXT." I would be perfectly happy to let the person in question qualify his assertion with any list of restrictions and caveats as regards context that he cares to specify. But, of course, the more restrictions on context that he makes, the less powerful his asserted abilities will appear to the outside world. In the extreme case where he claims the ability to hear the directionality of the wire, but with the caveat that he is not able to demonstrate that in any objective test setup whatsoever, then as far as the outside world is concerned, his "ability" becomes operationally indistinguishable from having no such ability at all.
Chris
Follow Ups:
Chris,
I follow your well-thought out argument and agree with most of it, but my next question would be is why does the outside world want to know and to what use does this information serve?
The way the situation presents itself to me is that the notion:
"his alleged "ability" has no utility, and in fact no meaning, if no test is capable of supporting his claim."
Does not come to terms with the reality that the test is an artificial and contrived situation, so why should findings within such a method have any outside utility and, more strongly, be the sole conferrer of "meaning."
Context does indeed constrain meaning and applicability. This is precisely what I'm getting at. The test situation provides limits to meaning which make it LESS useful in understanding "natural listening" in its myriad forms, rather than more useful.
I'm trying to avoid the topic of "objective" testing, but you are laying a lot of subjectively derived value on the "test." I say subjective because the methodology and authority claims of such tests are cultural constructions. The presumed strength of such tests seems to me to rest on guild-approved conceptions of positive knowledge and how to achieve it, rather than a solid grounding in sociocultural or logical reality.
The overt "scientificness" of the procedure basically throws away general relevance and replaces it with an ultra-specific and highly constrained relevance. The strangeness of the test context yields very tightly bounded results.
From my standpoint, "meaning" of X is what people use X for in context. If the context changes, the meaning of X changes,
What is needed is some way to study the phenomenon in natural contexts of use. This is difficult and it may be impossible to achieve the level of universal certainty you seem to covet.
Referring back to earlier remarks, this is not abandonment to radical relativity so much as recognizing the radical situationality of experience and meaning.
Yeah, a certain form of "relativity" emerges out of that position. This is the fundamental condition of human experience, however, and why I am arguing that the methods of positive science are impossible to apply in human research.
This may be way out of the comfort zone of engineering science but for anthropology there is no comfort zone. It is all gray area, interpretation.
Hope this is useful. I sometimes feel like an elitist pig preaching this esoteric academic stuff on audio forums, but you are getting very close to the golden nugget.
You see the dynamic of context and meaning but the next step is to realize that it destroys the "test" because this basic condition of human experience refuses to be subdued in the lab, quite the contrary.
Thanks, Chris, for your comments. You said it better than I did.
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Free your mind and your ass will follow -- Parliament/Funkadelic
"Chris,
I follow your well-thought out argument and agree with most of it, but my next question would be is why does the outside world want to know and to what use does this information serve?"
Joe, I think there are plenty of reasons why one would like to know whether alleged phenomena are genuine or not. The specific example that was being discussed, namely the audibility of directionality of wires, is itself a rather trivial one, and I personally am perfectly happy to dismiss it as almost certainly a delusion in the ears of the beholder. But the more general question about the verifiability of alleged audio perceptions is of rather wider interest.
On the face of it, double-blind testing is just about the only way that one could attempt to make an objective test of whether someone's alleged ability to discriminate between two different configurations is genuine or not. Now, you counter by telling us that research in the "social sciences" of human subjects reveals that perceptions are context-dependent, and so on. And that in that field, the notion of double-blind testing has been discredited.
I presume by that you mean that it has been demonstrated to lead to incorrect conclusions? But that, surely, must mean that the researchers in the field must have come up with some other procedures for determining whether the human subject can or cannot hear the difference between the two configurations of the system? The researchers are, one would certainly hope, not simply taking the person's word for it that he can hear a difference, despite not being able to demonstrate that ability in some sort of tests?
If you can cite research on alternative procedures, as opposed to double-blind testing, that have demonstrated a human subject's ability to discriminate between the two configurations of the system even when double-blind testing failed, then that would certainly be very interesting. I would have no problem at all with learning that some other objectively-administered test procedure was demonstrably more reliable at correlating a test-subject's claims with the outcomes of the experiments.
If, on the other hand, you are saying that *any* method at all of trying to verify a person's claim to hear differences between two configurations of the system is necessarily invalid and worthless, then it begins to sound more like a descent into a metaphysical morass, where words and statements no longer have meaning, everything is relative, and everyone's beliefs and claims were all of equal validity.
It seems to me that the default assumption, i.e. the most natural interpretation, of a failure of a double-blind test to confirm a person's alleged ability to discriminate between two configurations of the system, would be that the person really cannot in fact discriminate between them, and the alleged differences are all in their mind. Any other conclusion is, I feel, an "extraordinary claim" that requires extraordinary evidence.
Now, maybe you will tell us about other objectively-administered tests that do a better job than double-blind testing. But in the absence of such evidence, I don't see any reason to be unsatisfied with the "natural interpretation," namely that double-blind tests are a reliable way of testing people's claims. Of course, I am well aware that some people, such as those in the high-end audio business, will have a very strong vested interest in debunking the conclusions reached by double-blind testing. But is there any objective evidence that double-blind testing is unreliable?
Chris
I understand where you are coming from. Let me ask this...What makes the test objective?
I don't think there is an "objective." We perceive and experience the world though cultural filters. These are subjective. There is no outside stance.
Now, we can have cultural interpretations that match up with an observed empirical reality. This could be considered a validity test, the correspondence of interpretation with the structure of reality as we perceive it. I usually suggest substituting "empirical" for "objective" in these discussions, becausue there isn't any such thing as objectivity.
Objectivity is itself a subjective cultural construction, after all.
But let's remember that observation is also relative, as physics teaches us. Also the tools and concepts/definitions we use frame, limit, and configure our observations, hence a true "objective" universality of perspective is not going to happen.
> > where words and statements no longer have meaning, everything is relative, and everyone's beliefs and claims were all of equal validity.
They still have meaning but relative to situations/contexts. You have been living like this all your life, so wheres the big mystery?
Validity is not as clear cut as we would all want it to be.
In terms of audio testing procedure, I think that what would make the "test" more valid is to pluck the data from the flow of natural experience somehow.
A test is a test because it sets up a fake controlled situation. Unfortunately, doing so destroys the phenomenon we are looking to study, unless our interests only revolve around performance in that particular contrived situation.
To be scientific, by old scholl definitions, observation and logic yields conditions of necessity and sufficiency that force the conclusion to be true. People are just too creative, unpredictable, variable, and flaky for the model of lab rese4arch drawn from the natural sciences.
Maybe I think that to perfectly know whether somebody else can hear X is impossible but a quasi controlled casual "test" as related in the Pierre Sprey wire story is somewhat convincing to me...moreso because it was not a formal "test."
More important is whether _I_ can hear X. I would try to find that out by listening as I usually do and swapping the parts and listening carefully but not obsessively for differences. Time and some learning might be key factors that are ignored in clinical AB testing. I find that sonic differences can be amplified or attenuated and their significance best understood when some time is devoted to understanding them in one's usual music listening context.
Hey there is a guy who can identify LP records by looking at the grooves. I'd have to say that is impossible and I know I can't do it. Does it really matter if he can do it or not, aside from a certain human curiosity perspective?
In short, I'd have to say that I can not recommend a scientific method of the form and potency you seek to determine whether other people can ever, under any circumstances, hear unlikely esoteric differences.
I don't know how to plug this question into science. The nature of the human experience is too slippery to establish the logical links required for solid general knowledge via scientific observation and reasoning.
I suggest coming to terms with some forms of relativity. This is only a bad word in religious and moral contexts where absolute certainly handed down from above reigns over all meaning.
EE doesn't have that kind of authority beyond measurable aspects of electronic circuits. The clinical testing paradigm never achieves it.
Relativity and subjectivity are intrinsic to the human condition. Try to fight that and you will never get to the truth.
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Free your mind and your ass will follow -- Parliament/Funkadelic
"I don't think there is an "objective." We perceive and experience the world though cultural filters. These are subjective. There is no outside stance."But what *is* objectively testable is a person's claim to be able to discriminate between two configurations. Suppose someone tells me he can see the difference between a card coloured red, and a card coloured green. I will be inclined to believe him, because it is within my own experience of what I also can do. But I could also set up a double-blind test (well, not literally, of course!), to check whether he can indeed tell the difference between the two colours. And I can thereby now objectively determine whether his claimed ability is genuine or not. In this extreme example, the test will almost certainly confirm his claim, of course.
Now, suppose that he asserts that he can see the difference between the colours of two cards that look, to my eyes, to be identical. I can again conduct the double-blind tests, and determine whether his claim is valid or not. I don't see any way I am imposing any "subjective cultural construction" on him. It's a simple question; can he tell the difference or not?
We are all, I presume, happy with the use of a testing procedure to determine whether the person can tell the difference between the red card and the green card? In fact, it can be rather important to know whether someone is red/green colourblind or not. This is not a subjective cultural question; it is a simple matter of fact.
I would maintain that in fact the way that we determine the thresholds of detection in all the human senses is by means of experiments along the lines of the card-colour tests; how similar must the two colours be before the human eye is not able to discriminate between them? Likewise, we could ask questions such as how close do two audio frequencies have to be before we cannot discriminate between them. These thresholds are not cultural constructs, they are objective facts. Of course, the thresholds will certainly differ as between one person and another, and maybe they can change for a given person, depending on all sorts of factors like age, tiredness, mood, etc. But for the given test subject, at the given time of the test, the outcome is an objective fact.
Coming back to the rather absurd wire-direction example, as I said before I would have no problem with the person who claims the ability to hear the difference conceding that their abilities were sometimes better and sometimes worse, depending on the time of day, their mood, etc. But if they ended up having to concede that they could in fact *never* hear the difference when they were tested in a double-blind test, then I think it would be legitimate to conclude that the alleged effect was in fact entirely in their imagination.
Chris
Edits: 10/02/15
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