Right. I think the lesson for us from this study is that if there is more than one possible meaning of a word, you can't be 100% sure what the other person means by it unless you ask.
Exactly.
Communication is a two-way street. You need one party attempting to communicate, and the other sincerely attempting to understand. That way you can move towards some level of mutual understanding. If one party is inherently skeptical about the possibility of communicating something in language, he/she will make it all the harder to communicate by constantly rejecting attempts to do so.
But also once you establish a rapport, you don't necessarily keep having to have the same conversations of "what do you mean" for every little word.
I have such a rapport with my friend, an audio reviewer. Whenever he has something new in for review, usually speakers, he'll ask me to come over and give a listen to double check his own impressions. He won't say a thing about his impressions, I'll listen, and then I'll described the sound (or visa versa, I'll ask him to describe the sound before I do). So for instance I was recently over listening to some $65,000 loudspeakers he has in for review - a higher up model of the same brand, from which he owns a cheaper model in his second system. After playing a bunch of tracks I described what I heard in detail: the soundstaging and imaging characteristics, the bass quality, pluses and negatives, the timbral character and frequency characteristics and it's effect on various instruments, dynamics, issues I was having with some coarseness in the sound for some stuff, how it differed from his usual speakers in that room, how it differed from the cheaper model he owned upstairs, etc.
I wasn't surprised that he felt my descriptions pretty much perfectly agreed with what he was hearing. The issues that stuck out for me were ones that he notice too. That's the usual result when we compare notes that way.
And this is not limited to direct interaction with someone. In the same way, if you *care* about sound put in to subjective descriptions, and you pay attention to trends in subjective reviewers, you can over the course of various reviews, and comparing to your own experience with some gear he may have reviewed, come to understand
what a particular reviewer is describing. So when I hear some reviewers describe gear I've known, or that I go to hear after their review, I can say "Yeah, they really did communicate the gist of the character of this gear."
We always have to be careful to keep the big picture in mind. Our senses are fallible...yet still useful. Our memory is fallible, yet still useful. It all comes with caveats, but that's ok. There's a danger in falling in to a skeptical bias just as there is a gullible bias. The gullible with a positive bias toward X counts the hits and ignores the misses, and comes to an unjustifiable confidence. On the other hand someone disposed to a skeptical view can end up counting the misses and ignoring the hits, to dismiss the viability of a proposition. Which can take the form of appealing to studies in which, under the scenario of the study some fallibility is uncovered in our perception, but then leveraging that to an unwarranted level of skepticism regarding our perception.
Case in point: We talk about THD a lot. However, if I just say "THD" I might mean the THD spectrum overall, I might mean THD at 1Khz, I might be mostly thinking about the 2nd and 3rd harmonics, I might even be speaking improperly about all types of distortion combined. Even something "objective" like THD can mean something different in different people's minds.
Just one example of how communicating about audio in words is tricky, maybe that's why we like measurements and graphs so much here.
Yes, but note as you already indicated, and contained in the lesson of the study, is that simply appealing to measurements doesn't get you out of the communication problem. There's no magic dividing line between talking about penguins or talking about THD or whatever.
This is particularly sticky if measurements are used, as they are in audio, in the context of the subjective implications. If you say "the measurements indicate a 4dB low Q frequency dip between 200Hz to 400Hz " in a speaker...what have you communicated? It's meaningless without the context in which it has any meaning (e.g....it's subjective effects). You can't get away from the web of inferences, associations, implications etc also tied to communicating with measurements, especially when
it's subjective implications that we care about.
