darrenyeats;637530 Wrote: > I would say hot is just a word. > > It is hot. Subjective statement. > I feel it is hot. Factual statement. > > The second is clearly a fact because it is a statement about how a > person perceives something. Science knows about the placebo effect > precisely through experiments that use such "feely" observations as > data (facts) as input. > > Perceptions are facts only when they are described explicitly that > way. > > "You're annoying!" is a poor phrase compared to "You annoy me!" The > former is inflammatory and subjective. The latter must be accepted. > Understanding the very profound difference between these two is key in > many walks of life. > Darren The point made in post 59 is the only one which really matters: unless a statement asserts a testable and falsifiable proposition then in this context (broadly about how to make your hifi sound better)it is meaningless and/or unhelpful.
The distinction you refer to between "I feel annoyed" and "you are annoying" is well known and well ventilated in the fields of counselling, management theory etc but it has nothing whatsoever to do with electrical engineering. Of course the statement "I feel annoyed" cannot be vouchsafed (essentially for the same reasons as the Cogito), but that actually means that outside the sphere of personal relations it is meaningless or unhelpful. Its very certainty precludes it from imparting knowledge. Whilst it is strictly true that "I feel annoyed/hear an improvement" is a fact of sorts, it is not necessarily a fact which imparts any useful knowledge about the world. So back to the OP, the reason why blind tests are useful is to distinguish between not very useful facts about people's beliefs on the one hand and useful facts about (in this case) audio equipment. -- adamdea ------------------------------------------------------------------------ adamdea's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=37603 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=88345 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
