Will qualitative analysis be made obsolete by quantitative or mathematical reasoning?

Question

Quantification seems to be the trend in a number of disciplines. Contemporary Social Science research, for example, is increasingly becoming more inclined to quantitative methods, as they produce repeatable conclusions. Even the discipline of philosophy, under the influence of the analytic tradition, has become more mathematically rigorous in he advent of different technologies. Of course, there is nothing objectionable about all these. After all, everything is quantifiable.

But if everything is quantifiable, does this mean that everything is worth quantifying and that qualitative analysis will one day become obsolete?

Answer 1

Qualitative and quantitative reasoning are not antonyms. There are even research methodologies that are explicitly both: Fisher's Q-Methodology lets you know how likely a qualitative categorization is to have explained the varieties in a domain mapped by a range of descriptions.

Even in the world of correlational statistics, there are versions that are explicitly quantitative, and work on measures (ANOVA), and versions that use categorizations and focus on whether the data is appropriately categorized (chi-square).

The introduction of the probability of being wrong, or of being incomplete into the world of categorization does not make it quantitative per se. When you are all done, you still have quantitative analyses, you just have a way of comparing their potential certainty.

Given that they aren't even independent, one or the other taking over any entire domain seems impossible.