AudioBanter.com - View Single Post - A model of the brain, & quick-switch

wrote:
Mark DeBellis wrote:
wrote:
wrote:
What you don't seem to be willing to do, is to look at whether your
standards of proof have themselves defined a limited paradigm.

Sure we are. But we'd need evidence that this is the case.
Specifically, we'd need phenomena that we cannot explain. So far, we
haven't seen any.

Do you mean we'd need evidence in order to have reason to look at
whether the paradigm is limited, or we'd need evidence in order to
decide that it is in fact limited?

The former, and it is up to you to supply that evidence, if you think
the theory is incorrect.

It's part of good scientific methodology to know its own limitations.
As I understand it, Mike is saying that it would be desirable to look
at a wider class of data than the current paradigm delivers. If you're
saying that the current data give us no reason to think that that would
be desirable, that's just begging the question.

If the former, that sure looks
circular. Isn't Mike's point that the reason why we haven't seen
countervailing evidence is that it hasn't sufficiently been probed for?

In other words, we cling to the theory that elephants can't fly because
we haven't expended the effort to find elephants that can fly.

But we have many reasons to believe that elephants can't fly, beyond
the lack of immediate examples. And, as has been pointed out to you ad
nauseum, we have many reasons to believe that certain sonic differences
are inaudible.

We have certain *criteria* for audibility/inaudibility that we take to
be giving us such reasons, and (at least some of) those are what's in
question.

Are you prepared to argue that zoologists ought to expend time
searching for flying elephants, simply because a few ill-informed
people believe that elephants might be able to fly? And if not, why do
you make the identical demand of psychoacousticians?

That's why the burden of proof rests with the elephant-flight partisans
and their golden-eared equivalents to come up with some evidence. (And
it is not circular reasoning to demand this as a first step.)

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? What could be the intellectual virtue of insisting,
we don't have to look until it's absolutely obligatory?) And earlier I
did give such an argument, to the effect that there's no reason to
assume that differences in the perception of temporally extended wholes
will always be reflected in discrimination (where credit should be
given here to earlier remarks by Harry Lavo).

But
you'll notice that the partisans are not expending a whit of effort to
come up with that evidence.

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.

Instead, you wave your arms and make
pseudoscientific arguments like the one above.

A misnomer, because pseudoscience is, typically, something that
pretends to be science, but lacks that trait of science which is to
continually subject its own assumptions to careful inquiry.

Mark