Re: pitch

["Charles S. Watson" <watson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Al and List...

You are certainly right that I, along with every other sensory
investigator I have known, believe that there is something in the head
that accounts for the orderly responses given when we ask people to rank
stimuli on some semantic scale or other (ie, loudness, brightness,
annoyance, roughness, etc.).  The more similar the judgements are from one
person to the next (ie for loudness and brightness, but not so much for
annoyance or roughness) the more convinced we become that we really are
studying a fundamental dimension of processing.  Nevertheless, I believe
that when we do such things we are basically studying the way the
observer's use the language.  That is different in a very fundamental way
from determining their sensitivity to sounds of various levels, or their
abilities to distiguish one SPL from another, or to categorize them into
7 +/-2 (or some other number) of categories.

I believe that the words we use in scaling experiments are a very indirect
measure of what is going on in consciousness (or in the central processor,
or brain, or your favorite neural net or whatever one prefers to fill the
space between input and output of the system)...  I guess I agree with
Korzybski's arguments (General Semantics) about what a lousy
representation of reality human language is, even the realities are in the
head as well as those of the rest of the universe.  I don't think that
calling Steven's Power Law experiments exercises in number generation is
really too wide of the mark, as a matter of fact that is what Korzybski
would have recommended as a way of avoiding the vagueness of saying that a
sound is "very loud."  Measures, as Stevens argued so strongly, are only
understandable in terms of the operations used to obtain them.  The
operations involved in measuring sensory capabilities (like
just-detectible increments in SPL)  are very different from those used to
measure response proclivities (like judging the relative loudness of two
50-dB, SPL tones, one at 125 Hz and the other at 500 Hz).  In the first
case we can appeal to an external source of information to decide whether
the observers give the "correct answer", in the second we cannot.  As a
consequence, we go about the measures in very different ways...and
interpret them accordingly.  The challenge, to me, is to relate the two
domains.  I suspect we are not really too far apart...

Chuck



On Sat, 29 Aug 1998, Al Bregman wrote:

> Dear Chuck and List,
>
> Is it introspection when a person says, "That tone sounds twice as loud to
> me than the other"?  True, the researcher doesn't know about it until the
> subject puts it into words, but does the latter mean that it is not an
> introspection?  Without such introspections (transmitted to the researcher
> by words or numbers), we would not, for example, have Stevens's Power Law
> for loudness.  If the power law simply described the giving of numbers in
> response to tones, who would care about it?  After all, number-giving
> behavior is not high on the list of things we want to explain in
> psychology.  We care about it because we think it is a report on the
> experience of loudness, a phenomenon that really IS of interest to us.
>
> Many people pay lip service to positivism while really understanding that
> it is the underlying EXPERIENCE that is of interest.  No, Chuck, I don't
> think you are a positivist -- at least not if you think the power law is
> about loudness and not number-giving behavior.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Al
>
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