Epistemology (/ɪˌpɪstɪˈmɒlədʒi/ ( listen); from Greek ἐπιστήμη, epistēmē ‘knowledge’, and -logy) is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology). Recently I was having a conversation with my daughter about her academic interests and she mentioned that she likes quantitative analysis better than qualitative analysis. At that time it was obvious to me what she meant or at least I thought so. Then I started to mull over and felt startled. Till that moment, my understanding of what qualitative and quantitative was that they are very akin to cardinal and ordinal respectively in number theory.
As I started ruminating further, I started feeling ambivalent about my understanding. Are they really two different entities with nothing in common? Or are they binary view of material and spiritual entities? Or are they connected as in common adage of it is better to have a quality of life (e.g. happiness) over a (large) quantity of material possessions (e.g. wealth) as two ends of a spectrum? More importantly are they mutually exclusive? Before the on set of my ambivalence, it was obvious to me was that quality always implied fewer things of better value and quantity implied more things of lesser value. Based on this understanding I was simplifying my life in the quest of improving my quality of life. This quality versus quantity was never truer in my life than the present times. The oft quoted adage was from my childhood and loosely translated it says “it is better to have a spoonful of cow’s milk than a pot full of donkey’s milk”. In India, cow occupies a higher position in hierarchy than a donkey, needless to say.
Can we have a better quality with larger number of things? Is that fundamentally against the conventional wisdom? Did I get this quality versus quantity wrong all along? These were some questions that I started to think about and found AN answer in photographic world where I found better quality with larger number of entities.
Here is an example of single image (quality) in the town of Cortina, Italy.
Here is a panorama with 11 images that has the church as an element in the photograph. You can see that the panorama though has more images in it, it is visually more appealing (quality wise).
Here is another example of a panorama stitched with 45 images from Michelangelo Point, Florence, Italy.
With this meandering of thought, I am still ambivalent about the quality versus quantity paradigm as it is conventionally understood. By the way this image here is highly downsized for web purpose.
Stay safe, and be healthy. These pandemic times are the absolute worse times to be panglossian about environment.
