In search of cognitive equilibrium: Beauty, quality and harmony

The field of MCDM should become significantly concerned about problems that are also qualitative, ‘messy’, fuzzy or not well-defined-they abound in human systems. Dealing exclusively with quantitatively well-defined problematique (the proverbial ‘finding the shortest path’) is part of the unidimensional legacy of OR/MS: it programmatically neglects attributes of beauty, quality, harmony, aesthetics, safety and reliability. Yet these are the criteria which are ardently sought after by modern humans, while being mostly ignored or neglected by modern technocrats. This paper outlines a new MCDM approach to this fundamental challenge. While OR/MS researchers have squarely ignored the problem, some latter attempts have simply bowed to the insurmountable ‘mess’ of complexity and declared it to be beyond analysis, holistic or holy. Neither approach can be scientifically respectable. The paper proposes combining the MCDM-based displacement of ideals, fuzzy sets and holistic graphics into a coherent qualitative analysis approach. It shall use the attribute of beauty as a surrogate of qualitative dimension. An ideal (i.e. the best in a given class) is the most likely object to be labelled beautiful by most observers. It is proposed that beauty, quality and harmony, in all their fuzzy gradations, are directly related to a well-balanced, equilibrating reconstruction of the ideal.