The premise is that we have two general ways to discover and contribute to what we know and understand, the qualitative and the quantitative, the former usually associated with what-understanding and the latter with how-explanation. The individual results or sum is (information leading to) knowledge. The pursuit-method is different kinds of science. These approaches have their own breadths and depths and variations and mixtures, but reality is still one of the two ways, or both.
Qualitative and quantitative break apart along an inside-outside divide, and in number. The qualitative is concerned with the individual and individuals in a group. It is always somehow personal, having to do with the insides that we see and experience. A thing singular and things plural are held and seen outside of us, in the exterior world; and we count and try to describe these things. This includes the ideas (things plural) we have about that world. In short, this is the quantitative world.
If we take singular and plural and interior and exterior of what is, or we suspect to be, then we get a foursome, or quadrants: qualitative inquiry in the areas of person and people and quantitative inquiry in thing and things.
Both terms now, qualitative and quantitative, do not seem adequate to encompass our world, if they ever were, in its and our own richness and variety. But the terms are still useful in this simplified scheme.
The different perspectives or disciplines now take their place as elaborations on the new multiple in the pursuit of science as knowledge building.
What-is-the-experience-of becomes first person knowing (e.g., phenomenology and related interior human sciences). What do we understand, believe, value, etc., becomes first person plural (e.g., interpretive studies such as history, cultural anthropology). Examining it and explaining what and how becomes singular thing research, the object(s) of inquiry for "harder" (more exterior) science (e.g., biology, physics, etc.). Not least (because all four quadrants are contributors to knowing and understanding) is things plural and how they relate between and among (e.g., systems sciences, political science, etc.).
What does all this mean? That there is an expanding universe of how we know what we know. That might be conceptualized not in terms of qualitative versus/or quantitative but in terms of the object(s) of inquiry and whether we are looking at individuals or multiples from the inside or outside. Those objects (both singular and multiple) require different ways of knowing and understanding, that is different kinds of ways of knowing--science. Each has its truth value and contribution to make. And together, they make for a diverse but integrated view of what is. And this is perhaps the most important point.
If an integrated or integral view of what is comprises what we claim to know, then arguments about which view presides is superseded by all as at least part of the whole.
Application discussion next.
28.02.2005
Revised 23.09.2023
