Learsfool – Although it is hazardous to argue by proxy, I will do my best to respond to your brother’s comments.
To begin with, your brother suggested that I was guilty of the REIFICATION, which you define as “treating an abstract concept as if it had real material existence.” In the absence of more information, I can think of only two possible interpretations of this comment.
The first interpretation is that I have treated concepts IN GENERAL as though they had “real material existence.” In a way, this is true, because I have sometimes treated concepts as MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS of abstract categories. But mental representations have “real material existence,” insofar as they are characteristics of real physical things, namely persons. This use of the word ‘concept’ is not arbitrary or idiosyncratic. It is the prevailing use of the term in the cognitive sciences. However, the ordinary usage of the word ‘concept’ is ambiguous, in that it does not differentiate between concepts as ABSTRACT CATEGORIES and concepts as the MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS of those categories. Because of that, many of the posts in this thread contain that ambiguity, though it doesn’t seem to have affected the discussion much. I myself have used the term ‘concept’ sometimes to refer to abstract categories, and sometimes to refer to the mental representations of those categories, depending on the context. While acknowledging that ambiguity, I suspect you will be hard pressed to find examples of equivocation (i.e. arguments that exploit that ambiguity).
My views on these matters are quite conventional: Categories are abstractions. As such they do not have “real material existence.” Concepts are mental representations of abstract categories. As such, they do have “real material existence” IN HUMAN BRAINS. I would only qualify the last statement with the observation that, for any given category, there are many diverse conceptualizations, as I discussed in my post on 12/10.
The second interpretation of the charge of reification is that I have treated the concept of ‘neutrality’ IN PARTICULAR as though it had “real material existence.” If this is what your brother means, then I assume your brother’s reasoning is similar to your reasoning from an earlier post, when you objected to my definition of neutrality because it was defined in terms of the ABSENCE of coloration. I would ask your brother: Is entropy real? Is a vacuum real? Is biological equilibrium real? All of these scientific concepts are defined BY ABSENCE, as I mentioned in my post on 12/6. I would say that neutrality is as real as entropy, a vaccum, and biological equilibrium. And, in my view, that is real enough to make them valuable concepts, even if they create some metaphysical uneasiness about the existence of things defined by absence. For the scrupulous metaphysician, all of my observations about playback neutrality (which is defined by absence) can be easily converted into observations about playback coloration (which is defined by presence). But I believe that this level of metaphysical parsimony is unnecessary. And if your brother is advocating it, I would add that it is a surprising attitude in a social scientist.
Your brother also raises doubt about the validity and reliability of my operationalization of neutrality. To question its validity is to say that the observable conditions I mentioned to do not correlate with neutrality, but with some other variable, or with nothing. To question its reliability is to say that different observers would come to different conclusions about the observable conditions in my operationalization.
RE: RELIABILITY. You have questioned my operationalization’s reliability throughout this thread, arguing that audiophiles will never be able to agree on whether a particular component or system is more or less neutral. I have been more optimistic. Unfortunately, the answer to the question of reliability is a matter of speculation for both of us. This is where the scientific metaphors break down, because there is not likely to be a scientifically valid experiment testing the reliability of my operationalization any time before, say, the heat death of the universe. So we are limited to our conjectures, hunches, and intuitions.
RE: VALIDITY. There has been somewhat less debate on this thread about the validity of my operationalization. The empirical evidence offered is both anecdotal and controversial. Personally I have had a number of experiences that are consistent with the operationalization. But for those who have not, the only evidence possible is theoretical. One kind of theoretical evidence presented on this thread was the concept of ‘neutrality’ that emerges from looking at the playback system from the point of view of information. That is to say, by comparing the information available at the source vs. the information available at the ear, it is inevitable that some information will be eliminated, concealed, or corrupted. When that is audible and non-random, components and systems have sonic signatures, which I have called colorations, in keeping with widespread audiophile usage. And as I have argued, if differences in coloration exist, then differences in neutrality “exist” (with the necessary qualifications to avoid reification). Having said that, I believe that the controversy over the “existence” of neutrality is a distraction from the more essential issue: The existence of colorations. If colorations exist, they constitute some theoretical evidence for the validity of my operationalization. The whole issue of the "existence" of neutrality can be avoided with one simple change to the operationalization: Instead of it being a method for identifying GREATER NEUTRALITY, it is a method for identifying LESS COLORATION. And that is really the heart of the matter.
As far as your brother’s observation that "taste confounds quality, and people mess those up,” I guess I’m a little unclear what that means. Specifically, what does ‘quality’ mean here? Is he talking about the qualitative characteristics of music, or the virtues of a playback system?
