Science of Qualities
Contextual Quote
“A science of emergent qualities involves a break with the positivist tradition that separates facts and values and a re-establishment of a foundation for a naturalistic ethics. Participation now enters as a fundamental ingredient in the human experience of any phenomenon, which arises out of the encounter between two real processes that are distinct but not separable: the human process of becoming and that of the ‘other’, whatever this may be to which the human is attending. In this encounter wherein the phenomenon is generated, feelings and intuitions are not arbitrary, idiosyncratic accompaniments but directs indicators of the nature of the mutual process that occurs in the encounter. By paying attention to these, we gain insight into the emergent reality in which we participate.”
— Peter Reason & Brian Goodwin, 1999 [https://designforsustainability.medium.com/avoiding-extinction-participation-in-the-nested-complexity-of-life-e0d44a63a675
Description
(from an interview by Daniel Christian Wahl), Brian Goodwin:
“The Science of Qualities is really an extension of conventional science in the sense that it depends upon consensus, agreement and a methodology whereby people come to recognize the agreement or the consensus they have about the qualities of experience of other beings. These other beings could be animals, landscapes or organizations — a room, a building, whatever it may be.
Of course we live our lives in terms of qualities, more than quantities. Quantities have become important, but it’s the qualities that really give the texture and the qualities to our lives and our relationships. In a sense, relationships have become primary in the new science of networks and we have to recover this whole area of qualities. There are systematic ways now of demonstrating that people reach consensus very effectively about the qualities of experience of farm animals, about the quality that is expressed in a landscape, the quality of a river and so on.
These are things that people have always done spontaneously. It is common sense, and it has been excluded from modern science. Now we need to bring it back in as an extension of the science of quantities.” (https://hackernoon.com/a-science-of-qualities-experiencing-the-world-coming-into-being-living-on-the-edge-of-chaos-d54b6dce4c2c)