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Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous
Nonsense. THAT IS WHAT MUSIC THEORY DOES.
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Well, it's what it kinda tries to do... But as a field of study it's aware of its inherent limitations. It doesn't result in truly empirical measurement. And the piece you posted makes a lot of claims, many of them "true" enough, but none of it is truly empirical.
Musical theory is not the same as scientific theory. It serves a different purpose. Like literary theory and legal theory. What it gathers is not "evidence" by the strictest definition of the term, but rather rhetorical, anecdotal support. The piece you posted gathers self-reported semantic evidence to support thesis statements. Not hard quantifiable data that can be statistically analyzed to show or support a causal link.
Also, that piece is quite poorly written. Give me a red pen and let me go balls out on that thing.
But let's be straight with our terminology here. Theory isn't fact. Theory is theory. You can't create an equation to show that Chick Berry invented reggae. You can make a convincing argument in favor of that thesis, and the reader could accept the premise... But you're still dealing with subjective values. There's no way to prove that everyone other than Chuck Berry
didnt invent reggae. Can't prove a negative, semantically or scientifically. So remember that we're not dealing with the kind of theory that can truly be tested via rational empiricism or the scientific method.
Anyway, I'm nitpicking but there are two different worlds of theory/research/application. There's the quantitative and the qualitative and you're in a qualitative zone here, which doesn't even factor in to empiricism. Not without extensive post-treatment by other research.