What Is Quality?

Or: Why We All Know What We Cannot Explain

The other day I found myself standing in a B&Q, staring at a shelf of screwdrivers. Twenty-three different models, prices ranging from £2.49 to £38. I picked up the cheapest one, then the most expensive, and within approximately three seconds I knew: the expensive one was better. The handle sat differently in my hand, the metal had a different weight, the finish where handle met shaft was—well, what exactly?

I stood there like a complete pillock, trying to verbalise what I had just felt. “It just feels better” is not an explanation that would satisfy an engineer. “Higher quality” merely shifts the problem. What precisely had I perceived?

This is the annoying thing about quality: we recognise it instantly, but when someone asks us what it actually is, we stand there like a dog who’s lost sight of its owner—we know perfectly well that something’s missing, but we can’t say what.

Taste and Its Limits

The simplest answer, of course, is: quality is a matter of taste. Case closed, next topic.

This answer has the charm of an emergency exit. It frees us from the tedious obligation to think. Unfortunately, it’s also wrong.

I have a friend who drinks exclusively canned lager of a brand I shall not name here, as I have no wish to be sued. Let’s call it “Golden Misery.” He prefers this beer. He likes it. But when I ask him whether it’s a good beer, he says: “No, of course not. It’s cheap rubbish. But I like it anyway.”

This is interesting. My friend apparently distinguishes between what he likes and what is good. He has preferences and quality judgements, and they are not identical. If quality were merely taste, this distinction ought not to exist.

Furthermore: taste, as we know, is not something one argues about. Yet we argue about quality constantly. We advance arguments, we cite criteria, we sometimes even convince other people. One doesn’t do this with purely subjective matters. Nobody seriously argues that vanilla ice cream is objectively superior to chocolate. But people do argue that a Steinway grand piano is objectively better than a plastic keyboard from Argos—and they’re right.

The Bureaucrats Define

The International Organization for Standardization—ISO for short, that institution also responsible for the fact that paper is precisely 210 by 297 millimetres (A4, for the initiated)—has taken on the quality question. The result reads as follows:

“Quality is the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics of an object fulfils requirements.” (ISO 2015)

One must read this sentence twice to notice that it says essentially nothing. It is the linguistic equivalent of a dog chasing its own tail: circular motion, considerable energy, no progress.

The problem is obvious: where do the “requirements” come from? Who sets them? And—here it gets philosophically ticklish—how do we evaluate whether the requirements themselves are good?

If I require that a car must accelerate from nought to sixty in under three seconds, and my car manages this, does it therefore have “quality”? According to ISO: yes. But what if this requirement is nonsensical? What if I need a vehicle for city driving, where nobody ever accelerates to sixty?

The ISO definition is like a recipe that says: “Cook the dish so that it meets expectations.” All well and good—but what if I can’t cook and my expectations are that everything should taste of burnt rubber?

The Mystic Refuses

Robert Pirsig became famous in the seventies with a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig 1974). It is one of those books that everyone knows and nobody has finished, like War and Peace or the instruction manual for an IKEA wardrobe.

Pirsig’s thesis on quality can be summarised thus: quality exists, it is fundamental, but it cannot be defined. Every attempt to put it into words misses its essence. It is like the Tao—whoever speaks of it has already lost it. In his “Metaphysics of Quality,” he treats quality as a kind of metaphysical ground category that precedes the subject-object distinction.

This is, of course, immensely convenient. It spares one the tedious work of conceptual clarification. And it has a certain mystical charm that goes down well with motorcyclists of philosophical inclination.

But as an answer, it’s unsatisfying. It’s as if one were to ask “How does the heart work?” and receive the reply: “The heart is a mystery. It pumps, yes. But don’t ask how. The pumping transcends the question.”

If quality were truly indefinable, it would be unclear how we could ever learn to recognise it. We would all have to be born with a built-in quality detector, a metaphysical organ that responds to good screwdrivers. This seems to me rather less plausible than the assumption that quality is a complex but analysable concept.

Why We Can Judge Without Defining

Here I must briefly defend something that initially looks like a contradiction: we can judge quality without being able to define it—and this is not an argument for its indefinability.

Think of grammar. Every native speaker knows that “The dog bites the man” is correct and “Man the the bites dog” is not. This knowledge is certain, fast, and effortless. But ask that same native speaker to explain the rules of English syntax, and you’ll get, at best, vague mumbling.

This is not because no rules exist. It’s because our brain has two different systems: one for rapid pattern recognition, one for explicit analysis. The first system learns through examples and operates largely unconsciously. The second system is slow, laborious, and requires tea.

That we recognise quality intuitively therefore shows only that our pattern-recogniser has been trained. It does not show that no explicit criteria exist. The criteria are there—they simply reside in a different room of our mind, and the door is sometimes hard to find.

Temperature Was Once Mysterious Too

There was a time when people knew what “warm” and “cold” meant without the faintest idea what temperature physically is. They could feel it but not explain it. Had there been a Pirsig back then, he might have written: “Warmth transcends reason. It precedes all subject-object division.”

Then thermodynamics came along and explained: temperature is the mean kinetic energy of the particles in a system. Suddenly the concept was precise, measurable, scientific. The intuitive feeling of “warm” was not devalued—it was explained.

The same applies to many concepts that were initially only felt: colour, speed, force. The history of science is largely the history of making intuitions precise. Why should “quality” be the great exception?

What Quality Actually Is (A Proposal)

After this lengthy run-up, finally to the point. I claim: quality is a relation, not a thing.

An object does not have “quality” the way it has a colour. It has quality for something, in a context, measured against a standard. My screwdriver from B&Q has quality as a tool for driving screws. As a murder weapon, it would be mediocre. As a musical instrument, useless.

The quality of an artefact—let’s call it X—depends on:

The goal (what should X accomplish?)
The context (under what circumstances?)
The constraints (what must not happen in the process?)

And now comes the crucial point: quality is not measured against a Platonic ideal, but against the best known solution. If I want to know whether my knife is good, I don’t compare it with a perfect knife in some heavenly realm of Forms, but with the best knives that actually exist or have been designed.

Quality is the distance to the reference.

This is less poetic than Pirsig, but more useful. It explains why quality judgements are revisable: if someone invents a better knife, the relative quality of my old knife decreases, even though it remains physically identical. It explains why experts often agree: they know better reference solutions. It even explains why quality judgements sometimes diverge: different people have different reference points in their heads.

The Formal Version (For Those Who Absolutely Must Know)

Warning: The following paragraph is intended exclusively for professional philosophers with an extraordinarily high tolerance for cognitively induced confusion. In the past, reading formal definitions has reportedly led to severe migraines, nausea, and in at least one documented case, temporary Tourette’s syndrome. A senior lecturer at Oxford reportedly muttered “Bloody hell, he’s got a point” during a faculty meeting, which was considered wholly out of character. We assume that these symptoms were in each case only temporary in nature—to establish this with certainty, however, a longitudinal study in accordance with the principles of good scientific practice would be required. Approval from the relevant ethics committee for such a research project has been pending since the initial application was submitted in 1953; the matter was last classified as “still under review” in 1987. The committee has since moved offices twice and lost the paperwork once, but assures us the file is “in the system somewhere.” Claims for damages of any kind—including but not limited to loss of earnings, therapy costs, and damaged worldviews—are excluded. Continued reading is at your own risk. Everyone else will miss nothing here that they have not already read in comprehensible English. Skip to the next section. I mean it.

Very well then, here is the formal definition:

The quality of an artefact or process X is the degree to which X, in a context K, is suitable as a means to achieve a goal G under the relevant constraints C, measured as the distance between an explicit reference solution R—the best currently known or designed approach under K and C—and the present realisation of X.

If you actually read that: my sincere condolences. Your brain will most probably recover, but it may take several days. Should symptoms persist for longer than 48 hours, consult a philosopher you trust. Or better: a doctor. Under no circumstances contact a “life coach.”

What This Means in Practice

Back to my screwdriver. What had I actually felt when I picked up the expensive one?

Probably a combination of: handle ergonomics (goal: comfortable working), precision fit of handle and shaft (goal: durability), material hardness (goal: no deformation under load), surface finish (goal: grip when hands are sweaty). My pattern-recogniser had, in fractions of a second, compared these characteristics with stored references—other screwdrivers I had used—and rendered a judgement.

The judgement was not mysterious. It was merely fast.

And the cheap screwdriver? It fails on the same criteria, only in the opposite direction. It sits poorly in the hand, the blade will bend after a few uses, the handle becomes slippery when it gets warm. It is further from the reference.

That’s all. No magic, no transcendence, no metaphysical ground category. Just a complex but analysable comparison.

Coda

There’s a lovely phrase attributed to Duke Ellington: “If it sounds good, it is good” (Ellington 1957). This is true, provided one adds: “…and you know what good sounds like.”

Quality is recognisable, but it is also learnable. We are not born with ready-made quality detectors. We acquire them through experience, through comparison, through the slow accumulation of reference points. The wine connoisseur does not have magical taste buds—he has tasted many wines and learned to notice and classify differences.

Pirsig was right insofar as quality resists quick, simple definition. But it does not follow that it is indefinable. It is merely complex. And complexity is no reason for capitulation—it is an invitation to think.

I bought the expensive screwdriver, by the way. It still sits well in my hand.

References

Ellington, Duke (1957): Quoted in “Ellington Jazz Story On Tonight.” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 8 May 1957, p. 11C. Available at: Wikiquote – Duke Ellington

ISO (2015): ISO 9000:2015. Quality management systems—Fundamentals and vocabulary. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization. Available at: ISO

Pirsig, Robert M. (1974): Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. New York: William Morrow & Company. For background see: Wikipedia – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Wikipedia – Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality