What is Quality?
I don't want to really explain anything about this one, just want to see what people say. The narrator in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance went insane over this one, but doesn't really go into detail about the conversation he had with his students. I want to try to create our experience and discuss the root of quality.
Comments (23)
Quality is that which if you don't know what it is tends to make your life worse and if you do tends to make it better, but at the same time is impossible to satisfactorily articulate.
Value is worth.
Worth is perception.
Perception is fleeting.
Fleeting is temporal.
Temporal is reality.
Reality is metaphysical
Metaphysics Is quality.
Haha well that isn’t epistemologically correct but makes a half decent post
The definition of the quality of a chair is ever changing. A "perfect" chair hundred years ago did not incorporate modern ideas of ergonomic design, so the notion of the "perfect" quality of a chair back then is today considered normal or sub quality compared to what we view quality of a chair today. So quality can only be defined by the parameters of the current time and current designs and in comparison with other objects within this timeframe.
If you compare every chair since the dawn of civilisation, you would certainly find the best looking (although subjective interpretation) and best ergonomically designed chair somewhere. That chair would be of the highest quality of every chair ever built, but never future chairs. By definition, the best chair ever built to the end of time, would be the last chair built for a species that could sit down and based on improving previous designs in function and aesthetic form. However, that is just the purest definition through all time, quality should be regarded of a measurement within the current time and not throughout all time. That's also the only rational use of it's purpose as a word.
"I bought a chair of better quality than before", simply means, it functions better for the purpose of sitting comfortably and as part of my home interior design by the aesthetic properties of current trends in design.
It is certainly hard to define what quality is, since it's pretty subjective, but as a measurement of something better than before in function and form, it's as close to the objective definition of what quality is.
So you are saying that the chair has not changed but the way in which it is viewed? Why is that, because people are different or because "time" or something else is different?
If I am correct in stating, as I did, that it is both descriptive and quantifiable...………………
;-)
Quality is what you say before doing something - mapped with the deliverables when you finish...
The difficult part is a non-ambiguous specification of what the deliverables will be so that mapping afterwards is simple...
Hearty, :cool:
"So you are saying quality exists just in the observer?":
No. Quality must exist independently from the observer. However, its "materialization" could not be possible without it. Let me explain myself better. I believe that if everything were the same, not a single thing would really exist. I believe that that-which-causes-every-thing-to-be-unique must exist before anything else can. I will call that-which-causes-every-thing-to-be-unique Difference. Therefore, from my point of view, every thing exists because Difference exists; and as long as Difference exists, quality also exists, even if observers do not. However, quality without observers exists only as a possibility, and it is only through observers that quality becomes a property of bodies. So, since Difference exists, it is possible for quality to be a property of bodies, but it does not become such until observers with the capacity to compare exist.
As to the other acceptable definition of quality being 'value' or 'worth', I posit that it's because form is the aspect which we appreciate through perception, and quality being its more objective characteristic, it is imbued with that identity.
EDIT: is the OP asking for a definition or a theory?