evdplancke;684764 Wrote: > Once upon a time, a few centuries before our time, there was a very > clever man called Newton. Helped by a superior intelligence and a lot > of creativity, he invented in his head the law of gravity. Then > eventually he sat under a tree waiting for an apple falling on his head > and then suddently knew what he had found ;) > > Or maybe... I don't remember well... things happened the other way > around.
Hypothetico deductivism is the name given to popper's theory of scientific development that it doesn't matter what the theory is (it can be random) all that matters is whether it fits the data. This is all very well, but it doesn;t a. make tweakers into newton b. make subjectivist reports into data in this context. The relveant data is data which is capable of either proving or disproving the hypothesis. The problem is that the subjective "data" is equally consstent with the contrary-hypothesis (there is no real change in the music) as the hypothesis (there is a real change in the music). This is because, we know, listeners are likely to identify changes even where there aren't any. This is quite different to the painstaking gathered data about planetary and star positions from eg Tycho Brahe which fed Copernicus Gallileo and Kepler. There is a powerful case to be made that it doesn't matter what theory one has as to "why" a law works if it works. Newton's own views on the underlying metaphysics are absurd. But in order to say that something works it has to fit the data. Real data; data capable of proving or disproving it. Are we getting there? Incidentally can someone point out a genuine advance in electrical engineering which has been prompted by audiophile observation such that the audiophile observation contradicted the scientific understanding at the time, but was subsequently proven correct and scientific understanding was changed to accomodate it. There have been a number of posts which imply that this has occured, but it might help if a concrete example was given. -- adamdea ------------------------------------------------------------------------ adamdea's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=37603 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=91322 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
