Are you a Verificationist about audio?

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

Mr. T, I'm sure that you are familiar with the old saying about there being only two things in life that are certain.

When it comes to everything else in life, we deal with and make judgments and decisions that involve uncertainties, probabilities, shades of gray, and matters of degree. The better informed those judgments are, and the greater the amount of information that is available upon which to base them, and the better our understanding of that information, the greater the likelihood that those judgments will be correct.

Fabulous posts, Bryon!!

Best regards,
-- Al

Mrtennis,
I'll see your syloogism and raise some Yogism:
There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell them.
It's Bryon not Byron!

the question connoted in the thread

"are you a verificationist ?"

begs the question of a definitive method of verification.

if you are trying to verify a perception, it seems that there is no way to do it which yields certainty of results.

the world is a stochastic environment, where probability rules. so, you can not be sure, or, certain that you have verified something. there is always some probability of misperception when you attempt to coroborate, or even replicate someone's perception.

Mrtennis. I will use your proper name when you start using mine. Until then…

MrBadminton wrote:

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, number theory, which are subject to proof.

None of this is under dispute. I completely agree that it is impossible to prove empirical statements with the same kind of certainty that mathematical and logical statements can be proved. That is a widely held view. In fact, it is the PREVAILING view among both contemporary philosophers and scientists. There is nothing iconoclastic in it, as you seem to believe.

MrRacquetball also wrote:

the problem with perception 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.

Where to start? To begin with, it doesn’t make one dent in the Paradox of Skepticism I presented to you in my earlier post. But let’s ignore that for the moment.

The “problem with perception,” as you call it, is not nearly the problem you make it out to be. To begin with, science has innumerable examples of successfully explaining entities, properties, and laws of the physical universe that CANNOT BE PERCEIVED by the senses. You need look no further than Wiki’s page on Elementary Particles to see a huge array of entities, properties, and laws that cannot be perceived (except very indirectly through instrumentation). That is an indisputable illustration that human knowledge has advanced far beyond the limits of human perception.

The fact that scientific theories are fallible, revisable, provisional – in a word, “uncertain,” – is not cause for Radical Skepticism of the kind you routinely endorse here on Audiogon. Science has generated the greatest succession of explanatory triumphs in recorded history, in spite of being “uncertain.” To deny the whole of science the status of “knowledge” on the basis of its uncertainty is like denying the polio vaccine the status of “medical cure” on the basis that it has only a 99% success rate.

By equating “knowledge” with “certainty,” you have created a concept of “knowledge” that is woefully out of touch with any ordinary, philosophical, or scientific understanding of what knowledge is, making your repeated statements about the limits of knowledge either incomprehensible or irrelevant. As for your comment that...

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

...it is a mistake to conflate certainty with truth. Certainty is a characteristic of KNOWLEDGE, namely the absence of any possible doubt. Truth is a characteristic of REPRESENTATIONS, namely their correspondence to reality. The denial of CERTAINTY leads to intellectual humility, the exploration of ideas, and the progress of knowledge. The denial of TRUTH leads to intellectual arrogance, the stagnation of ideas, and the perversion of knowledge.

There are real challenges to the progress of science and human knowledge, but the absence of certainty is NOT one of them. It is a pseudo-problem, one that captures the imagination of people who are already resistant to the progress of knowledge.

Hostility toward knowledge has been a feature of the American landscape for decades. By advancing your form of Radical Skepticism, you are throwing your lot in with a group of people whose ideological and often fanatical hostility toward knowledge is a hostility toward civilization itself. Hostility toward knowledge stalls the progress of ideas, stifles efforts to reduce human suffering, and threatens the very survival of our species. Yes, literally.

It ain’t just about audio, MrPingPong.

B-R-Y-O-N