(May 9, 2013 at 3:23 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Secondly, reduction of qualitative knowledge to quantifiable knowledge produces category errors that lead to absurd conclusions, like attributing mental properties to simple mechanical operations or denying the existence of felt experience altogether. All talk about ‘emergent properties’ disguises this category error.
This is the point that interests me. I'm fine with qualitative knowledge not being reducible to quantifiable knowledge but I would add it is reasonable to suppose that the reverse is also true. The knowledge that science gains us is not dependent on nor reducible to qualitative knowledge. We are not in danger of 'waking up' to find that what science has revealed was but a dream. As a truce I would offer that both qualitative and quantifiable knowledge are capable of standing on their own and neither is reducible to the other.
If you wished to study qualitative knowledge in an open and careful manner I don't think you could do better than a phenomenological approach. If we find commonalities we might begin to get some sense of what is the nature of qualia in themselves. But I anticipate that we would never (could never?) experience anything that doesn't have a quantitative analogue. All our reference points come from the objective world and so that is the language we must bring to describe what we find.
Recognizing that to be the case it would be essential to understand that everything we use to describe our subjective experience must be understood to have an "as-if" quality. The literal must be abandoned or at least understood in a different, poetic or symbolic way. None of this is my own idea but rather what I understand from depth psychology, from Jung to Hillman. But it has informed the way I approach the philosophic problems of the self and psychology.
That will have to do for a start. Gotta get to work.
