Hi Francois,
Thank you for your question and my apologies for the delay in reply.
How are you? I was looking forward to the possibility of visiting Rwanda with Greg and meeting with you but that now seems off the cards.
To reply to your questions, I was describing a standard scientific approach to making justified theories. To spell it out in full ...
1. Any justified theory must be unambiguous in its meaning. It must be necessary and sufficient in its prediction without being tautological.
2. The theory must be derived by a combination of evidence and logical reasoning based on axioms and assumptions
3. The logical reasoning must be tight, i.e. it must not contain any fallacies and must derive directly from the evidence and other logical reasoning, going back to axioms and assumptions that are expressly stated.
4. That the evidence and the reasoning and any tests for validity on either must be capable of replication.
5. That the whole project of the development of that theory must satisfy being subject to the most stringent philosophical analysis of its ontological, epistemological and methodological aspects.
So, if I make a theory about how people view a web page, the theory must be unambiguous in what it predicts and how and why. It must be based on a combination of empirical evidence and logical reasoning in turn based on other well justified theories. The logical reasoning on which it is based must not be false or fallacious and must be necessary and sufficient. It has to be possible for others to do the same research data collection, data analysis and reasoning and tests of them that led to this theory. And, finally, if any number of philosophically critical nit pickers went over any and all aspects of the theory, reasoning and evidence (including those other theories, reasoning evidence and assumptions that it depends on that others have created), it must be able to stand up to them without them identifying any flaws.
Warm regards,
Terry
==
Dr Terence Love
MICA, PMACM, MAISA, FDRS, AMIMechE
Director
Design Out Crime & CPTED Centre
Perth, Western Australia
[log in to unmask]
www.designoutcrime.org
+61 (0)4 3497 5848
==
ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Francois Nsenga
Sent: Friday, 26 January 2018 5:57 PM
To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: What is a PhD...curriculum?
From a just curious lay-person:
Dear Terry,
Either on or off-list, could you please give me a hint, maybe with example(s), of what you mean by:
'the use of evidence and tough tight logical reasoning and deep philosophical logical analysis to be able to identify unambiguous theory findings that can be critically replicated'
With many thanks in advance and warm regards,
François
Rwanda
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