I wouldn't say a subjectivist point of view is necessarily unscientific. I understand that some of the posters in this thread are engineering guys. It kind of makes sense that you take a more objectivist position. In the natural sciences, you sometimes can have relatively tightly controlled experiments which can be repeated a very large number of times.
But when we talk about human perception, I believe it's much harder to control for every possible effect. You can't get a truly random sample of test subjects. Perhaps your budget limits you to 30 or 50 probands. Etc. Ultimately, you have to make some hard choices and make some assumptions based on your prior beliefs. Maybe we believe some cognitive biases can have such a profound impact that we go through the trouble of making a trial a blind trial. But maybe we believe (say, erroneously believe) subjects' emotional and moral dispositions won't matter much for the observed outcome so we fail to control for them. What I'm trying to say is that I believe most research is subjectivist. The questions you ask (as well as those you don't ask) alone make it subjectivist. And I think it's important to acknowledge that. Hopefully, it will lead us to be explicit about the assumptions we make. And it should also impact the methods we choose, e.g., using Bayesian as opposed to frequentist statistics. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ poing's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=63617 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=104227 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
