One little post about ambiguity. This notion keeps me busy this week. I would like to explain my feelings about this underestimated characteristic of our world at the hand of a speech Frits Spangenberg made at the ESOMAR Qualitative congress in Istanbul.
He said that research could play a role in separating emotions from facts in the whole credit crunch debate. Separating those could prevent the crisis to go out of hand.
Now I like Frits a lot and I have a huge respect for him both as a researcher and the ESOMAR president. But I think that this is actually a complete mistake. The notion of something to be either emotion or a fact. The root of the mistake is that it would and could be possible to separate emotions from facts and therefor ‘rational concepts’. This is however not true. The interesting fact of this crisis (and all economic crises) is that it makes very apparent the two cannot be separated. If there is a difference between the emotional and rational way the human mind looks at the world mind (which I doubt) the two are heavily interdependent. Emotions create facts and the facts create new emotions. It is not either / or, it is and / and. The mutual influence between the two creates a complex system were mind creates reality and reality changes mind.
If there is a role for research it is not to separate the two, but to find out the patterns in the way they intermingle.