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You're cherry picking your example. This is a single measurement that doesn't capture the relevant qualities of sound but is widely used for social/marketing re

by haliax 10y ago

You're cherry picking your example. This is a single measurement that doesn't capture the relevant qualities of sound but is widely used for social/marketing reasons. That's not the a flaw in reductionism as a philosophical stance or a methodology, it's just PEBKAC. > That's what happens when you use a measurement-driven, reductionist approach to perception. You value what you measure, whether or not what you measure explains what you observe. This is just silly. Your observations themselves are measurements, and reductionism done properly should end up systematizing those measurements. Even for subjective qualities, you can measure peoples responses (e.g. how "warm" is this sound, which of these two sounds more "energetic") and (to the extent that those responses are nonrandom) search for relationships to measured quantities. > And Modernist Cuisine falls into the usual failings of western reductionism - if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist. That's nonsense. 1. I keep seeing this without explanation, what about reductionism is particularly Western? Or is there some brand of reductionism that is distinctly Western versus one that is Eastern? 2. As far as "if we can't measure it it doesn't exist", to the extent that this is the stance of reductionism it's only insofar as measure includes "perceive the effects of". Warmth in music? Counts as a measurement. Roundness of flavor? Counts as a measurement. The goal of reductionism is simply to reduce these to simpler measurements of physical quantities and relationships thereof. 3. If you can't reduce the measurement to something based in physical quantities then either a) we humans consistently perceive it (e.g. in blind taste tests) and your physical quantities or possible relationships are lacking or b) we humans do not consistently perceive it and it's either a poorly defined quality (each person comes up with their own definition based on what it seems to them that it should describe) or it's just a randomly applied label picked up by social instinct. (Critics describe the same wine with different qualities based on the label it was served to them with [1]). Now, that's the nonsense. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/io9.gizmodo.com/wine-tasting-is-bullshit-heres-why-496098276/amp https://www.google.com/amp/io9.gizmodo.com/wine-tasting-is-b...

beat 10y ago
This is old, but yeah, reductionism is specifically western. It's derived from Descartes (who believed the entire physical world can be reduced to numbers, and introduced the idea of dualism - there's a world that exists, and a mind that understands), and from Newton, who developed calculus and established what has become the scientific method. Or, as a PhD physicist friend eloquently put it, "Before calculus, we didn't understand how the world worked. With calculus, we do." In the Newtonian/Cartesian world (reductionism), the entire physical world can be reduced to numbers. You measure and compute. If you don't understand, it's a failure of measurement, not of methodology. The problem is, this neglects many valid distinctions that the mind can recognize, but cannot be measured. In particular, it falls apart on problems of complexity, of interrelationships between many possible states of many possible elements.

by haliax 10y ago

beat 10y ago

This is old, but yeah, reductionism is specifically western. It's derived from Descartes (who believed the entire physical world can be reduced to numbers, and introduced the idea of dualism - there's a world that exists, and a mind that understands), and from Newton, who developed calculus and established what has become the scientific method. Or, as a PhD physicist friend eloquently put it, "Before calculus, we didn't understand how the world worked. With calculus, we do." In the Newtonian/Cartesian world (reductionism), the entire physical world can be reduced to numbers. You measure and compute. If you don't understand, it's a failure of measurement, not of methodology. The problem is, this neglects many valid distinctions that the mind can recognize, but cannot be measured. In particular, it falls apart on problems of complexity, of interrelationships between many possible states of many possible elements.