Quality in philosophy

In philosophy, a quality is an attribute or a property characteristic of an object. In contemporary philosophy the idea of qualities, and especially how to distinguish certain kinds of qualities from one another, remains controversial.

Background
Aristotle analyzed qualities in his logical work, the Categories. To him, qualities are hylomorphically–formal attributes, such as “white” or “grammatical”. Categories of state, such as “shod” and “armed” are also non–essential qualities (katà symbebekós). Aristotle observed: “one and the selfsame substance, while retaining its identity, is yet capable of admitting contrary qualities. The same individual person is at one time white, at another black, at one time warm, at another cold, at one time good, at another bad. This capacity is found nowhere else… it is the peculiar mark of substance that it should be capable of admitting contrary qualities; for it is by itself changing that it does so”. Aristotle described four types of qualitative opposites: correlatives, contraries, privatives and positives.

John Locke presented a distinction between primary and secondary qualities in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. For Locke, a quality is an idea of a sensation or a perception. Locke further asserts that qualities can be divided in two kinds: primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are intrinsic to an object—a thing or a person—whereas secondary qualities are dependent on the interpretation of the subjective mode and the context of appearance. For example, a shadow is a secondary quality. It requires a certain lighting to be applied to an object. For another example, consider the mass of an object. Weight is a secondary quality since, as a measurement of gravitational force, it varies depending on the distance to, and mass of, very massive objects like the Earth, as described by Newton’s law. It could be thought that mass is intrinsic to an object, and thus a primary quality. In the context of relativity, the idea of mass quantifying an amount of matter requires caution.

The relativistic mass varies for variously traveling observers; then there is the idea of rest mass or invariant mass (the magnitude of the energy-momentum 4-vector), basically a system’s relativistic mass in its own rest frame of reference. (Note, however, that Aristotle drew a distinction between qualification and quantification; a thing’s quality can vary in degree). Only an isolated system’s invariant mass in relativity is the same as observed in variously traveling observers’ rest frames, and conserved in reactions; moreover, a system’s heat, including the energy of its massless particles such as photons, contributes to the system’s invariant mass (indeed, otherwise even an isolated system’s invariant mass would not be conserved in reactions); even a cloud of photons traveling in different directions has, as a whole, a rest frame and a rest energy equivalent to invariant mass. Thus, to treat rest mass (and by that stroke, rest energy) as an intrinsic quality distinctive of physical matter raises the question of what is to count as physical matter. Little of the invariant mass of a hadron (for example a proton or a neutron) consists in the invariant masses of its component quarks (in a proton, around 1%) apart from their gluon particle fields; most of it consists in the quantum chromodynamics binding energy of the (massless) gluons (see Quark#Mass).

From Aristotle to Cartesio and Locke
Quality is one of the Aristotelian categories with which one can determine how it is by answering the question “which one?”.

The category according to Aristotle, in an enumeration remained in force until medieval scholasticism, can indicate:

provisions and clothes (or “possessions”)
ability and incapacity
sensitive features
figure and geometric shape
In Cartesian philosophy the term quality is used both in a generic sense, as the attribute or characteristic of a thing, and specifically as a reference to quality in the Aristotelian meaning of what affects our senses. But while Aristotle and scholasticism advanced the conviction that cosmology was based on four “real qualities” (hot, cold, dry, wet), Descartes believes that any sensible quality is purely subjective, so that color, heat, etc. they are not objective characteristics, inherent in things, but they, even if they originate from objective propertiesof the same thing, they always refer to the subject who sensitively senses it. According to Descartes, the only inherent properties of the thing are shape and figure because they can be expressed to a degree that is independent of our subjective sensory perception.

The modern Galilean science of nature picks up and accepts this distinction that will later be theorized by John Locke in the differentiation of “primary qualities”, objective as those characteristics that belong to the body itself (extension, figure, motion etc.) and “secondary qualities”, subjective (colors, sounds, smells, tastes, etc.) that are not invented but that do not correspond in reality.

“The ideas of the primary qualities of bodies are images of them and their forms (patterns) actually exist in the bodies themselves; but the ideas produced in us by secondary qualities bear no resemblance to them. »

Conceptions of quality as metaphysical and ontological
Philosophy and common sense tend to see qualities as related either to subjective feelings or to objective facts. The qualities of something depends on the criteria being applied to and, from a neutral point of view, do not determine its value (the philosophical value as well as economic value). Subjectively, something might be good because it is useful, because it is beautiful, or simply because it exists. Determining or finding qualities therefore involves understanding what is useful, what is beautiful and what exists. Commonly, quality can mean degree of excellence, as in, “a quality product” or “work of average quality”. It can also refer to a property of something such as “the addictive quality of nicotine”. In his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig examines concepts of quality in classical and romantic, seeking a Metaphysics of Quality and a reconciliation of those views in terms of non-dualistic holism.

The new Kantian physics
Contrary to George Berkeley (1685 – 1753) who had argued that even the primary, objective qualities actually have a subjective constitution, Immanuel Kant will reaffirm Locke’s distinction and indeed will theorize that even subjective ones can be brought back to the concept of quantity and therefore understand them as objective.

The limiting quality as an intensive quantity
For Kant the categories of quality must be deduced from the logical distinction of judgments that are defined as affirmative or negative based on quality: beyond these, according to Kant, there is the infinite and limitative judgment that is expressed by the judgment «A is not -B »: therefore the quality categories would be those of reality, negation and limitation.
The first two (reality and negation), however, in nature are never isolated but linked to each other so as to always represent a limited reality (expressing the third category) then a “degree” of reality that as such will represent a greatness objective, a quantity, not extensive but intensive, objective and measurable.

Extensive quantities have the characteristic of being external to each other, for example in a line one can separate a segment: this can not be done with the intensive quantities that interpenetrate and instead develop along a continuous line on which one can “cut” an intermediate degree.

While the extensive quantities refer to the transcendental functions of space and time, the intensive ones are pure matter, the object of our sensations that perceive it with different degrees of intensity: both quantities have a continuity structure such that in experience there are neither spatio-temporal vacuums nor interruptions of intensity.

In the transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, in a chapter entitled “Anticipations of Perceptions”, Kant gives a mathematical conception of qualitative perceptions thus reinforcing the new science of nature now predominant over the ancient non quantitative physics of the Aristotelian legacy.

Quality and its medium
Quality, as the definition of an object, is opposed to the object as a carrier of quality; The opposite is denoted by the terms “substance” and “attribute”, the former being conceived as an unchanging, unified, “unqualified” eternal basis of various attributes that characterize this basis. In the attributes themselves, two degrees are distinguished: qualities necessary and essential, characterizing the substance, and properties that belong to the object at a given moment and are variable.

This common understanding of the relation of an object to its quality, illuminated by a rationalist philosophy (for example, Spinoza), needs significant amendments. We learn about objects from perceptions that do not tell us anything about the constant quality carrier. Substance is, therefore, the concept attached by our thinking to the quality with which we become acquainted through our sensations. But since science has shown that in the sensation the quality of the object itself is not given at all, but only the response of our consciousness to an external, unknown influence, it became necessary to distinguish the qualities of two genera: objective, belonging to the subject itself, and subjective, belonging to the subject and only attributed to the subject.

Locketried to draw a line between subjective qualities and objective; to the latter, he included number, form, movement and rest, magnitude and position. This division, however, does not stand up to criticism, for Locke attributed to the primary such qualities, which, in essence, determine not the object itself, but its spatial and temporal relations. To say that in an object space and time are the most essential qualities, it means to say that in it it is essential that it does not belong to it, and vice versa. Space and time, in any case, are not the essence of reality in the sense in which we attribute reality to qualities accessible to our perception; space and time are the forms or conditions of the possibility of perceiving quality. Thus, the analysis of qualities leads to the recognition of the subjectivity of the whole content of our perceptions. On the other hand, and the very concept of substance as a carrier of quality does not enrich our knowledge of the subject at all and is a pure fiction, the emergence of which is explained by the apparent impossibility to think of qualities as independent elements of the world. The only reality for a person is the state of his consciousness, including the perceptions of the external world; therefore, subjective, so-called secondary qualities, we have the right to consider part of the reality available to us.

The “poverty” of quality
Hegel in the Science of Logic defines the category of quality as the most “poor” of the categories, that is, a constitutive insufficiency that surpasses even that inherent in the category of quantity.

In fact, quality on the one hand is suitable to determine the aspects of things that stand out precisely on the basis of it, on the other hand this feature is so transient and changeable, as evidenced by the continuous different qualities that take things (such as for example in the phenomena of chemical mutation), which results to be so determined by the finiteness to be lost in the infinity of the changes of quality.

For this reason the category of quality is completely incapable in its limitation of giving us the right vision of reality characterized by the infinite dialectical change.

Modern thought
Modern thought has put aside, considering them as simple verbalisms, typical of scholasticism, and non-existent for purposes of greater understanding, those which Aristotle considered as the various meanings of the category of quality. Thus, for example, in considering what Aristotle indicates as an accident of quality, the disposition, one can see how even without it one always has the understanding: for example, saying that opium produces drowsiness (quality) is not different from saying that opium has a dormant disposition (an acceptance of quality).

On the basis of these criticisms, however, the logical-linguistic aspects emerged from the Aristotelian analysis that have now been reexamined by modern logical empiricism have been neglected for a long time.

Source from Wikipedia