This is the first in a series of three papers in which the methodological status of Q-analysis is investigated. Is Q-analysis an esoteric skill, or a general scientific methodology? For completeness the main ideas of Q-analysis are developed from first principles. Then one can investigate if Q-analysis has a body of explicit knowledge and procedures for describing complex systems, formulating theories of their behaviour, data collection, data analysis, and interpretation. The ‘expert system test’ is set up to ask if the body of knowledge in Q-analysis can be made sufficiently explicit to become the predicates and rules of an expert system. A positive result would certainly indicate methodology, and it is indeed possible to abstract a number of explicit procedures and rules which scientists can follow when investigating complex systems. The extent to which these might form a replicable methodology which could in principle be implemented as an expert system is discussed in the second and third papers.
