A Nondualist Social Ethic: Fusing Subject and Object Horizons in Measurement
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2019). A nondualist social ethic: Fusing subject and object horizons in measurement. TMQ--Techniques, Methodologies, and Quality, 10(Special Issue on Health Metrology), 21-40. https://portal2.ipt.pt/media/manager.php?src=servico&cmd=file&target=m1_MTc2NDQ#page=21
Posted: 16 Feb 2024
Date Written: 2019
Abstract
Is it possible for measurement to satisfy both the need for global unity and shared human values, on the one hand, and the need to respect and value individual human uniqueness, on the other? Can humanity figure out new ways of enacting self-understanding that recount its past, present, and future in terms that not only better enable everyone to feel part of something larger than themselves but which also liberate them in free creative expressions of joy for life? Any viable social ethic has to begin from the paradox of attempting to integrate the opposed poles of human totality and human singularity. Even when one conceives of a social ethic in terms of a system, the end result demands respect for a complex combination of harmony and dissonance that is better understood in terms of systems of discontinuous systems, or meta-systems. Taking language as a model of integrated subject-object unities sets up possibilities for coherent multilevel measurement information infrastructures. Health care, education, management, and other areas in which ordinal counts, percentages, and ratings typically are treated as measures stand to benefit the most from realizations of this kind of nondualist social ethic and its realization of meaningful quantification.
Keywords: complexity, information infrastructures, measurement, nondualist philosophy
JEL Classification: B16, C01
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation