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In Reply to: RE: Variability and context posted by cpotl on September 22, 2015 at 15:49:00:
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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Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent -- Wittgenstein
Free your mind and your ass will follow -- Parliament/Funkadelic
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Follow Ups
- RE: Variability and context--Key point - Joe Roberts 05:58:08 09/29/15 (3)
- RE: Variability and context--Key point - cpotl 07:21:08 10/02/15 (2)
- RE: Variability and context--Key point - Joe Roberts 08:06:20 10/02/15 (1)
- RE: Variability and context--Key point - cpotl 08:49:53 10/02/15 (0)
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