Are you a Verificationist about audio?

05-19-12: Mrtennis
byron:

you are accurate in your assessment of my skepticism.

i do repeat the argument you encapsulated so well in a syllogism, because , it has not been definitively refuted.

It's ironic to me that you are challenging someone to "definitively refute" your belief that knowledge cannot be derived from perception, since by your own admission that belief is based on another, namely that the only things that can be "definitively proved" are logical and mathematical proofs. The irony should be obvious...

If the only things that can be definitively proved are logical and mathematical proofs, then your belief that knowledge cannot be derived from perception is itself, UNPROVEN. Your skepticism fails to meet its own standards of evidence. That is funny to me.

Here is another little syllogism, which I will call the Paradox of Skepticism, courtesy of MrT...

1. The only things that can be proved are logical and mathematical proofs.

2. The belief that "The only things that can be proved are logical and mathematical proofs" is not a logical or mathematical proof.

3. The belief that "The only things that can be proved are logical and mathematical proofs" cannot be proved.

That may not be a "definitive refutation" of your Ideology of Skepticism, but it is a definitive demonstration that your skepticism is self-contradictory and facile.

Bryon (not Byron. Number of times I've reminded you: 107)

Parry, thrust, point.

Bryon, after a while, and fashion, you'll be able to do this blindfolded.

It's almost unfair.

Absolute certainty is no assurance of what is. There is an old saw in medicine that goes something like this:
"No patient is in real danger until all his doctors agree on his diagnosis."

Consensus begs to be knocked over. Whether arrived at mathematically, empirically, or through happenstance, conclusions are not entirely definitive.

Granted, there are constants in life, evidenced by math, direct observation and blind luck, that will never change. Not everything is, though.

Every now and then something pops up to challenge or mystify (depending on strength of belief and conviction) the status quo and I, for one, welcome those little inconveniences.

All the best,
Nonoise

05-19-12: Nonoise
I would consider myself a 'verificationist' in as much as I put my trust in things not to blow up, short out, or commit some other kind of catastrophic failure upon turn on. Thank goodness for UL. Beyond that, I'm content to try things that my own, lying ears perceive to be for the better in my musical appreciation regardless of whether or not it has been thoroughly vetted to the satisfaction (if attainable at all) of any cadre of rejectionists...

I agree with this. Though my general stance is that of a moderate Verificationist, I am open to trying nearly anything, as evidenced by this list of tweaks I've tried. My Verificationist attitudes tend to come out when confronted with something that strikes me as nonsense or deception. I suspect that is a rather common disposition among audiophiles.

05-20-12: Nonoise
Consensus begs to be knocked over. Whether arrived at mathematically, empirically, or through happenstance, conclusions are not entirely definitive.

Again, I agree completely. ALL knowledge is revisable, as the history of science has demonstrated literally thousands of times. There is NO empirical knowledge that is certain. But that does NOT mean we must all become Radical Skeptics, who insist that there is no knowledge whatsoever. That is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Strike that. It's throwing everything in the house out with the bathwater and then burning the house to the ground.

There are VAST amounts of knowledge in science, in culture more generally, and even written into our DNA. While none of that knowledge is certain, that fact does not impugn its status as knowledge. Whether it is the common sense view of knowledge, the prevailing philosophical views of knowledge, or the scientific views of knowledge, knowledge is the totality of beliefs that we have good reasons to think are true. We don't have to be CERTAIN a belief is true to regard it as knowledge. Not by any standard that survived the past century of rigorous debate on the subject.

The last great intellectual effort to defend epistemology based on certainty was mounted by the Logical Positivists. They were trounced so thoroughly by people like W.V.O Quine, John Dewey, Wilfred Sellars and Karl Popper that the Quest for Certainty is almost universally recognized to be an exercise in quixotic futility. Yet the very same people who so strongly advocated that we abandon the Quest for Certainty did themselves believe that knowledge and truth exist. Which brings me to…

05-20-12: Nick_sr
Let me share my Popperian view on this matter…The issues lies not with the ability to verify but rather with how the statement is structured. The statement must be falsifiable.

I am in complete agreement with Karl Popper on the standard of falsifiability as the criterion for distinguishing scientific statements from non-scientific statements. Although Popper wrote extensively on the impossibility of certainty, he nevertheless believed that knowledge exists, as his second most well known book, Objective Knowledge, makes abundantly clear.

Popper was of course a harsh critic of Verificationism, in the sense in which the Logical Positivist intended it. But that is NOT the sense in which the term has been used in this thread. The term “verification” has been used in this thread to mean the same thing as “corroboration,” and that is something that Popper most certainly believed in. And so the Popperian view is essentially the view I’ve been advocating under a different name.

And now we are getting somewhere.

Bryon

let me try to escape from the paradox, byron, which you stated in a syloogism.

i make the assumption that only that which is either true or false is subject to proof.

statements of an analytic-apriori nature fall within the set of that which can be proven.

for example, in euclidian geometry, one can prove base angles of an isoceles triangle are equal. the proof does not involve the senses.

when you perceive, the result has some probability of being true and a probability of being false. thus perceptions cannot be proven true or false.

in the empirical world (experience) absolute proof is not possible.

in the world of the abstract, it is possible.

there are many other examples in trigonometry, boolean algebra, calculus, num,ber theory, which are subject to proof.

the problem with preception is that one can never say the perception is true, with certainty.

one may have confidence in one's perceptions and act on them, but one can never be sure that one's perceptions are true.

confirmation by others, if the sample is large, can lead to confidence, but not truth.

This will sound clumsy so bear with me as I have to come down a rung or two on the ladder of abstraction in order to relate.

So the Popperian perspective as it pertains to corroboration is simply to understand that corroboration is generally all that is needed to determine a consensus necessary to arrive at an agreeable, though not necessarily definitive conclusion?

A conclusion adequate enough to allow further investigation and development knowing that what has preceded isn't necessarily definitive but convincing enough to rely on until disproven, dispelled, or modified at a later date?

A most progressive (dare I say, liberal) way of thinking that allows for variance and an amount of randomness since nothing is absolute.

Certainty is not what it denotes: more a goal than an end point.

All the best,
Nonoise