Foundational principles

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 2:56 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> Interesting, because everything *I* could possibly want to say is also said, in the very same article:
>
> "The fallaciousness of arguments from ignorance does not mean that one can never possess good reasons for thinking that something does not exist, an idea captured by philosopher Bertrand Russell's teapot, a hypothetical china teapot revolving about the sun between Earth and Mars; however this would fall more duly under the arena of pragmatism, wherein a position must be demonstrated or proven in order to be upheld, and therefore the burden of proof is on the argument's proponent."

Yes, and clicking on "evidence of absence" yields

"The difference between evidence that something is absent (e.g. an
observation that suggests there are no dragons) and a simple absence
of evidence (e.g. no careful research has been done) can be nuanced.
Indeed, scientists will often debate whether an experiment's result
should be considered evidence of absence, or if it remains absence of
evidence (e.g. the experiment could have missed what it was looking
for)."

But in our case, the Russell's teapot argument isn't even where we're
at, because we're not debating over the meaning of a null result from
some experiment. We don't have any experiments at all to talk about at
all. And, all the ones you keep proposing are like "go survey the
microtonal community and see if people claim to perceive a resemblance
between A and B, and if not, that establishes musical impossibility to
a high degree of confidence because of Russell's teapot." No, this
isn't "scientific" at all; it doesn't establish anything of the sort.

If you'd like to really do an experiment that would yield useful
information to talk about, then go and do what every other real-life
scientific field does in this situation, which is actually perform a
basic longitudinal study over the course of many years where you give
a whole bunch of people new tuning systems to play around with and see
how their perception changes. That would be the sort of thing that
actually DOES help us understand how adaptations to novel tuning
systems work, at least as a starting point for foundational research,
much unlike what we have now.

And, even if you got sponsorship from a University and did such a
study above (and if this is what you want to do, I'm all for being a
part of it), that still wouldn't be the definitive end of the story,
no matter how much money you spend:

- Did you check to see what the difference was between musicians and
non-musicians?
- How do you know that you're not just measuring what people typically
tend to adapt to, as opposed to what they COULD adapt to with specific
ear training that your study didn't include?
- Did the choice of instrument played (i.e. timbre) influence the
results at all?
- Was there a difference between the musicians who were still playing
in 12-EDO at the time, and the ones who only did this for many years?
- Were the musicians too used to 12 to adapt, and the nonmusicians too
lacking in musical ability to adapt, thus excluding the population of
people with musical ability

etc. There will be a ton of criticism, which will hopefully spawn some
more studies. And if history has anything to say on the subject,
whatever conclusions you extrapolate from it will probably be changed
pretty dramatically within 20-30 years. And, in the meantime, we'll
still have to deal with taxes and staying in shape and politics and
all of the other mundane aspects of ordinary life. But, it would at
least be a good starting point, and one more susceptible to "Russel's
teapot" debates.

If what we care about is adhering to "science," then this is what
"science" actually looks like in the real world for every other
real-life scientific field on planet Earth that actually adheres to
the scientific method when these sorts of questions come up. It's very
clear what the different roles of cross-sectional vs longitudinal vs
epidemiological vs etc studies all are and people are careful not to
equivocate between them (unless they're trying to sell fad diet
books). Basing concrete physiological claims on the results of an
epidemiological study is a big no-no in medicine, for instance, just
like making neurological and cognitive claims from the results of...
no study at all... makes no sense at all in the context of our little
group here.

AND IF NO LONGITUDINAL STUDY IS AVAILABLE, people don't just pretend
that it is, or lower their standards to accommodate the lack of
existing research. They don't just commit an "argument from financial
infeasibility" fallacy and just pretend the matter is still solved,
because of "science." They accept that the existing research, or
pseudo-research, is nothing more than an interesting, non-conclusive
platform for further study, and openly admit when their speculation is
speculation.

However, sometimes I think that we're not really too concerned about
fetishizing science on here (I'm into some pretty hardcore science
pr0n myself), but about fetishizing some philosophy on life which is
just claimed de facto to BE "more scientific." This discussion has no
place in actual science at all.

-Mike