Quantitative thinking is just so much mystical numerology unless it is grounded in qualitative thinking. Unless you don’t need your mathematics to mean anything with respect to the world, you must relate it to the world by using a system of assertions called a model. Of course, you know this, I’d just like you to bring this fact out from behind the curtain where you normally keep it.
Example: when I hear a scientist talk about how winning the lottery (or some other rare event) is less likely than getting hit by lightning, I have to wonder what the odds are of being hit by lightning if you take shelter during a storm, as most people do, or if you live in Nome, Alaska? I bet agoraphobic people are far less likely to die in car accidents, too. In other words, broad numerical reasoning, when applied to specific cases without recalculating for those cases, is essentially the same thing as the sloppy qualitative reasoning that you’re worried about. It’s just as absurd.
Maybe what you’re trying to say is that sloppy and ungrounded qualitative reasoning is to be avoided, in favor of quantitative reasoning grounded in the appropriate qualitative reasoning that give the numbers meaning. That would be a qualitative judgment on your part, of course, but it seems like a defensible one in this case.
I think you are trying to advocate, not quantitative reasoning, but rather good reasoning. There’s no call to hang the albatross of bad reasoning around the neck of qualitative research as a field. That bird belongs to all of us.
I’m nervous about the word happiness because I suspect it’s a label for a basket of slippery ideas and sub-idea feelings. Still, something I don’t understand about your argument is that when you demonstrate that for you happiness is not a terminal value you seem to arbitrarily stop the chain of reasoning. Terminating your inquiry is not the same as having a terminal value.
If you say you value something and I know that not everyone values that thing, I naturally wonder why you value it. You say it’s a terminal value, but when I ask myself why you value it if someone else doesn’t, I say to myself “it must make him happy to value that”. In that sense, happiness may be a word we use as a terminal value by definition, not by evidence—a convention like saying QED at the end of a proof. In the old days the terminal value was often “God wills it so”, but with the invention of humanism in the middle ages, pursuit of happiness was born.
In the case where someone seems to be working against what they say makes them happy, that just means there are different kinds or facets or levels of happiness. Happiness is complex, but if there are no reasons beyond the final reason for taking an action, then as a conceptual convention the final reason must be happiness.
Now I will argue a little against that. What I’ve said up to now is based on the assumption that humans are teleonomic creatures with free will. But I think we are actually NOT such creatures. We do not exist to fulfill a purpose. So the concept of happiness, defined as it is, is a story that is pasted onto us, by us, so that we can pretend to have an ethereal conscious existence. I propose that the truth is ultimately that we do what we do because of the molecules and energy state that we possess, within the framework of our environment and the laws of physics.
I could say that eating makes me happy and that’s why I do it, or I could say that the deeper truth is that my brain is constructed to feel happy about eating. I eat because of that mechanism, not because of the “happiness”, which doesn’t actually exist. We make up the story of happiness not because it makes us happy to do so, but because we are compelled to do so by our physical nature.
In the words of Jessica Rabbit, I’m just drawn that way.
I normally wouldn’t take the scientific happiness pill because I seem to be constructed to enjoy feeling that my state of mind is substantially a product of my ongoing thoughts, not chemicals. To inject chemicals to change my thoughts is literally a form of suicide, to me. It takes the unique thought pattern that is ME, kills it, and replaces it with a thought pattern identical in some ways to anyone else who takes the pill. People alive are unique; death is the ultimate conformity and conformity a kind of death.
But the happiness illusion is complex enough that I may under some circumstances say yes to that pill and have that little suicide.