Ya, chuao, basically what I'm saying is that many (most) objectivists are discarding proper empiricism. In modren empiricism, you realise that you do not prove something true with an experiment, you just show it to be not false in that particular case. The most examples of not-false tests you have, the more sure you can be that your theory is true. We are quite sure the theory of gravity is true since it's been tested millions of times in different ways. We are much less sure about superstring theory, as it still has yet to stand to any real tests. We are not sure about the theory of the mind, since evidence is contradictory.
Theories, no matter how well seeming, can be disproven. A Biggie was parity conservation in physics. An absolute tennant of subatomic physics for a long time was the concept of parity, that is that two physical systems, one of which is a
mirror image of the other, must behave in identical fashion. Well turns out this ISN'T the case, even though it seems ot make a great deal of sense and all scientists believed it to be so. Pairty violation has been experimentally demonstrated on many occasion since it's discovery.
I think that with audio, empiricsts are too sure of themselves that everything that is relivant to human hearing has been discovered. From what I've read on it, results are inconclusive. There are tests that show people can't hear anything, tests that show they can, and many that produce no useful data. At this point I think it is premature to claim that we are capable of accurately reducing sound quality to a set of numbers.
If I decide to go to grad school, I may try and do research on this topic, but I think for now it's incorrect to state that we can objectively measure everything important to sound quality.
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