"Mark DeBellis" wrote in message
...
Bob Marcus wrote:
Mark DeBellis wrote:

The standard required here is not that of evidence that there are
which it's science's business to get, following proper procedures),
but rather that of a plausible argument that there *could be*,
differences that don't get captured with the prevailing methodology.
(Why isn't that enough to justify inquiry into the possible limitations
of the approach?

Because it is merely the idle speculation of people who apparently
haven't
made
the least effort to understand the state of the science as it exists
today. The only reason anyone is engaging in such speculations is because
they are misinterpreting the significance of their own observations,
based
on a misunderstanding of the basic science.

Even if you're right about that, the truth or falsity of what is
speculated is independent of the causes of the person's speculating.
So if the claim is independently interesting (as it is to me), why not
evaluate it on its own merits? And yes, many of us are amateurs, but
by putting our ideas down and inviting feedback we are, in a way and at
least sometimes, making an effort to understand the science, through
discussion with like-minded others.


You know, Einstein was a railroad telegraph clerk when he came up with the
insight that generated the theory of relativity.


You can't expect scientists to
bother investigating anything so specious.


And he received much the same response initially.


It depends what you're talking about. Some suggestions are more
plausible or well motivated than others. With regard to Mike's
suggestion that the focus of attention or perceptual set makes a
difference, that strikes me as an interesting idea and I very much
doubt that it has been sufficiently explored in a fine-grained way.
And it's not really a question of what I expect scientists to do, but
of how much what scientists have learned so far tells us.


snip

Why can it not be useful in itself to comment on the existing paradigm,
and remark on its limitations? Not everybody who can do that is a
psychoacoustician.

Everyone who can do that usefully knows an awful lot more about
psychoacoustics than you (or me, for that matter). All science builds
on what came before. Even Einstein built on existing foundations.


Yep, they have all learned the currently acceptable paradigms to a
fair-thee-well. But sometimes it is hard for someone in such a position to
step outside the box and look at the bigger picture.

Perhaps like Einstein musing about a train whistle.........?


And I haven't seen any Einsteins around here.


I'm not sure you would know one if you ran into one. That's my point.


Yeh, for that you have to go to rec.einstein, but I guess I'm more
optimistic than you seem to be that an amateur can come to see the
basic structure of a scientific approach and inquire usefully into
method and evidence. Anyway, we find ourselves parties to this
discussion, and though we're not Einsteins -- nobody's perfect -- we
still have to carry on somehow, don't we?


Not if you already know all the answers already.