@djones51
I think the word "impartial" does better work than "objective."
I like what you said here:
Let’s say you’re a restaurant critic. There may be certain foods that you subjectively dislike—ones that are just not to your taste. But when critiquing dishes, you must leave your subjective tastes aside and be objective about what you eat—making objective judgments about things like how it’s cooked and seasoned and how the ingredients work together. Even if you’re served a dish that you subjectively don’t like, it’s your job to objectively assess its quality.
One of the niggling things about scientific experimentation, is that it always involves a selection of which data to pay attention to and how to weight that data. Those aspects of scientific procedure are not written in the "book of nature." Such selection and weighting come back to the purpose of the experiment — what one wants to accomplish. And that's a valuational question.
One of the great things about science is the corroboration process. No one can get away with the partiality we decry around here because there is a procedure to describe the experiment's objectives, control variables, etc. In other words, to make sure that everyone has aligned what counts as "the" data, valid results, and relevant facts.
Other than these ways of operating, there is nothing more we can do to check our results because we don't have an extra-human access to reality. But this has gotten us to the moon, etc., so there's not much to worry about.
One last point, pertinent to another post. Because listening is about the reception of meaningful sound, the idea that we have machine to measure what we hear misses the point.
Someone could know (and hear) all the words in a poem and yet be quite unskilled in interpreting what it could mean. That's one reason this debate is somewhat wooly and wild -- the "meaning" factor is unaddressed by measurement science.
