This article falls into the wine critic trap of using meaningless terms like "round" to describe flavor.
If you want an example of really high-quality science-based treatment of cooking, take a look at Modernist Cuisine. Minimal bullshit, plenty of chemistry.
And Modernist Cuisine falls into the usual failings of western reductionism - if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist. That's nonsense.
It reminds me of back when I used to do homebrew hi-fi (influenced by the Japanese, naturally). Once you start really listening rather than measuring, you start seeing the flaws of a measurement-driven system. For example, hi-fi equipment is often marketed in terms of THD (total harmonic distortion). Is it actually relevant? No. But it is easy to measure. Measuring the harmonic content of a 1khz sine wave is even less musically relevant than measuring how well a car drives at exactly 60mph in a straight line. It doesn't take into account frequency range, balance, dynamics, phase shift, intermodulation, back EMF from speakers (think about it - a speaker is not only a motor, it's also an alternator, that absorbs mechanical sound energy in its suspension and spits it back down the line as AC energy greatly delayed and distorted from its original form, and the amp outputs have to absorb it), etc. THD is a nonsense measurement. But every manufacturer brags about their THD specs.
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.
I bet homebrew hi-fi is a great way for getting those "warm" "liquid velvet" sounds. I know if I settle for less when listening to my favorite oob meditation soundtrack (cage's 4'33") then my aura starts vibrating freaky purple all over the place and we all know what a bad day that can make.
You are measuring things too. If there wasn't a physical phenomena happening you wouldn't experience anything! You are using different tools, but you are doing the same thing as us "reductionist westerners".
While I don't think it was stated very clearly, the impression I got from the grandparent poster was that in many cases metrics actually distract from the thing we actually care about, in this case "how does it sound?" You can't really represent that as a number, because in one case "rich resonant lows and a warm sound" might be what you're after, while in another "crisp, distinct highs, and extremely high fidelity" could be preferable, and it is the gestalt that produces the aesthetic quality.
Except that psychology research constantly shows humans can't make consistent assessments of these things (e.g. expensive stuff always "sounds/tastes/looks better" simply because we "know" it's more expensive, even if it's the same as the cheap version). That's the whole reason we use measurements...
So, how do you measure love? Or satisfaction? Or grief? Lots of things exist that cannot be measured.
And really, a lot of the things I mentioned are very hard to measure, because the data source (music) is very dynamic and inconsistent. But that's missing my point... audio equipment is sold using a meaningless measurement because it sounds important and is easy to measure. It has nothing to do with the clearly audible distinctions between different amplifiers.
Why do you think emotion can't be measured? As another poster mentioned, emotions are (unless you have religious objections) the result of physical processes, which can be observed with sufficient equipment.
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.
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.
If you want an example of really high-quality science-based treatment of cooking, take a look at Modernist Cuisine. Minimal bullshit, plenty of chemistry.