Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T21:31:40.087Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Qualitative and Quantitative: How and Why

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

J. E. Turner
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Not in the lay mind only, but also to a wide extent throughout the realm of Science itself, there exists the belief that no matter how thoroughly research is pursued, it can never yield anything more than descriptions of whatever it may be concerned with. Undeniably, such descriptions are becoming so complicated in detail, and at the same moment so far-ranging in their applications, that they inevitably assume the aspect of more or less final explanations; and previous investigators often regarded them as being actually explanatory, finding indeed in this supposed result one of the most powerful impulses to carry their inquiries to their utmost limit. This however, it is frequently contended, is at best a short-sighted error and at worst a misleading superstition; the truth, no matter how unwelcome it may seem, being that explanation is unattainable because it is a wholly non-scientific category and ideal. If then we wish to discover any sufficient reason, any ultimate ground, any final solution, we must turn from Science to Philosophy; and even so, many sceptics do not hesitate to add, we are foredoomed to disappointment.

Type
Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 10 , Issue 37 , January 1935 , pp. 71 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1935

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 71 note 1 Huxley, , Essays of a Biologist, p. 71.Google Scholar

page 73 note 1 The New Background of Science, pp. 55, 224. Whyte, , Critique of Physics, p. 175.Google Scholar Cf. alsoFreud, , The Future of an Illusion, pp. 96., 97.Google Scholar

page 74 note 1 Adventures of Ideas, p. 164.

page 74 note 2 Pp. 190, 209, 55, 296; cf. p. 298.

page 75 note 1 Barnes, , Scientific Theory and Religion, p. 600.Google Scholar Eddington has emphasized this standpoint in The Nature of the Physical World. Similarly, “science deals with the calculable, measurable element in reality in abstraction from other elements.” Matthews, , Dogma in History and Thought, p. 21.Google Scholar

page 75 note 2 Substance and Function, p. 92.

page 75 note 3 Whitehead, , Adventures of Ideas, pp. 176, 197.Google Scholar

page 75 note 4 Whitehead, , Philosophical Review, Vol. 41, p. 140.Google Scholar

page 75 note 5 Costello, , Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XXV, p. 439.Google Scholar

page 76 note 1 Darwin, , New Conceptions of Matter, p. 119.Google Scholar