Are you a Verificationist about audio?

05-20-12: Nonoise
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?

Not exactly. Popper was far less concerned with corroboration than he was with falsification. Popper was responding to a group of philosophers like the Logical Positivists who believed in a form of Foundationalism, the idea that the truth of a belief could be proved by deriving it from more "basic beliefs." In Empiricist forms of Foundationalism, like the kind advocated by some of the Logical Positivists, "basic beliefs" were themselves derived from sensory experience. The goal was to create a method of justifying higher level beliefs that guaranteed their CERTAINTY, and thus could serve as a standard for evaluating the truth of beliefs, particularly scientific beliefs.

The whole enterprise was a spectacular failure. You’d have to visit a cemetery in Vienna to find a Logical Positivist these days. Karl Popper was one of the reasons for that. Popper argued that it is impossible to establish the truthfulness of a belief, scientific or otherwise, with CERTAINTY. He proposed what would become a famous standard for differentiating scientific beliefs from other kinds of beliefs. According to Popper, scientific beliefs are FALSIFIABLE. A belief is falsifiable if and only if there is a *possible* observation or experiment that would contradict the belief.

A propos of my conversation with MrLacrosse, although Popper did not believe in CERTAINTY, he believed in TRUTH. But he was far less concerned with the process by which a belief is judged to be true than he was with the process by which a belief is judged to be false. And he recognized that, even when we judge a belief to be true (through corroboration), we might be, and usually are, wrong.

It's worth pointing out that this was NOT a form of skepticism. Popper also believed that the long process of scientific Conjectures and Refutations eliminated false beliefs more and more, bringing us closer to the truth. A truth about which we could never be certain.

And that is just scratching the surface.

Popper had one of the most profound, and IMO, correct views of science of anyone in the 20th century.

Bryon

Bryon's first post today gets my vote for the best post on Audiogon so far this year.

Bryon,

Thanks for the clarification. As usual, you've opened more doors than I thought possible. It's nice to have to think things through, again.

Oh, and what Learsfool says, +1

All the best,
Nonoise

05-21-12: Learsfool
Bryon's first post today gets my vote for the best post on Audiogon so far this year.

He would be competing against himself, IMO, as I would give several of his other posts similar nominations. Starting above, with the first of those dated 5-20-12. Also this one dated 8-18-11 (liberally interpretating "this year" to mean either the past 365 days, or "this fiscal year" :-)).

Best regards,
-- Al

Thank you Learsfool, Nonoise, and Al. It's nice to feel appreciated. :-)

Bryon