Dear All,

A few days before Christmas, an issue came up in the thread on claims of terra nullius in the academy. This is the issue of new knowledge. What is new knowledge? And what constitutes an original contribution to the knowledge of a field? These questions deserve consideration in their own right  

David Sless suggested that we “think about the pressure on PhD students to come up with new knowledge. The impulse to seem to go where no-one has gone before must be irresistible, particularly from within the narrow confines of an academic discipline desperate to enhance its reputation and gain success in the academy through its publication record in specialist publications.”

Lubomir Popov commented, “In most cases, the reinvention of new concepts and disciplines is a result of poor education, poor doctoral training, incompetent doctoral advisors, skipping the original sources, and so forth. Instead of referring to the originals from the 1960s, people refer to a paper from 2018. Well, you can expect that in that paper the original idea is bastardized and presented as a personal invention and achievement.”

There are many causes for the problem. As Heidi Overhill noted, one such cause is creeping managerialism in the universities combined with inappropriate measures for academic performance. 

Another cause is a shift in the nature and structure of universities. Seventy years ago, there were perhaps 1,500 universities in the world. Along with universities, there were polytechnics, teachers colleges, independent art and design schools, special colleges, four-year colleges, two-year colleges, and all kinds of higher schools offering education after secondary school. None of these other kinds of schools had a PhD program. Only universities offered the PhD, and only the largest and best financed universities offered a wide range of PhD programs. Other than full research universities, most schools did not require the PhD for jobs.

Today, there are between 14,000 and 20,000 institutions called universities. It’s hard to tell exactlyhow many of these exist because different nations keep track in different ways. Some universities have many campuses with PhD programs on every campus. Most offer a PhD program of one kind or another, and nearly all require PhD degrees for full-time, permanent positions. To meet the demand for teachers with a PhD, thousands of universities vastly expanded their doctoral programs. This took place despite the fact that many lack qualified supervision staff and too few staff able to teach the research skills and research methods required for a solid PhD program. Many staff in these programs are qualified on paper only because they have a PhD, but many of these degrees are paper qualifications from deficient PhD programs. Nevertheless, the paper qualification means that the graduates are often permitted to supervise doctoral students — or even to establish and manage doctoral programs. The limitations and ignorance of unqualified supervisors and research program heads limits the new graduates in their turn. The new graduates have a PhD, but they don’t know what they don’t know.   

This leads to grandiose but meaningless efforts to seek new knowledge. It also leads to the problems that Lubomir notes.

Nevertheless, there are some reasonable solutions. It is difficult to change the global system, or even to change most national systems, given the structural and political difficulties we face. Even so, it is possible to make changes and improvements at the local level — to make improvements within specific PhD programs at single universities.

One place to start is to get an understanding of knowledge and what it means to contribute to the knowledge of a field. The field of epistemology focuses on this issue. In recent years, philosophers have developed specialised frameworks for this inquiry. Social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and epistemic normativity are three important avenues of inquiry.

You can read good summaries on social epistemology in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-social/

It’s also worth reading the entry on epistemology:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/

And I’d suggest looking at the various entries on knowledge. 

John Greco (2010: 4-10) discusses knowledge an an achievement rather than something we discover or stumble upon. Greco’s discussion differentiates knowledge from what he labels “mere lucky success.” He locates knowledge within the normative domain, as “an arena in which we operate with both familiarity and facility. By reflecting on our thinking and practices in this arena …. we gain insight and understanding into what knowledge is” (Greco 2010: 4).

If we’re going to describe and discuss knowledge, we need to do more than simply speak about new knowledge or old. 

The issues I raise here are questions and challenges. Discussing them at length is more than I can manage in a short post to the list. Rather, I assert that we must understand a great deal more about what we mean by knowledge when we use the term.

What is also worth considering is what PhD students must be able to do if they are to contribute original or new knowledge to the field. 

One of the significant problems I observe as an editor is a lack of skill in the work of authors with a PhD. I also see this as a reviewer for other journals. While I cannot see people’s degrees as a double-blind reviewer, it is fair to assume that most authors have a PhD. I can certainly see that authors have a PhD when I read published articles with simple deficiencies that editors or reviewers should have caught.

What skills do we expect in someone who is able to undertake responsible research? 

Gordon Rugg and Marian Petre (2004: 6-7) offer a list of the skills for which we look in someone when we award the PhD degree [Use of academic language] “correct use of technical terms; attention to detail in punctuation, grammar, etc.; attention to use of typographic design … to make the text accessible; ability to structure and convey a clear and coherent argument, including attention to the use of ‘signposting’ devices such as headings to make the structure accessible; writing in a suitable academic ‘voice’; [Knowledge of background literature] seminal texts correctly cited, with evidence that you have read them and evaluated them critically; references accurate reflecting the growth of the literature from the seminal texts to the present day; identification of key recent texts on which your own PhD is based, showing both how these contribute to your thesis and how your thesis is different from them; relevant texts and concepts from other disciplines cited; organization of all of the cited literature into a coherent, critical structure, showing both that you can make sense of the literature – identifying conceptual relationships and themes, recognizing gaps – and that you understand what is important; [Research methods] knowledge of the main research methods used in your discipline, including data collection, record keeping, and data analysis; knowledge of what constitutes ‘evidence’ in your disciplines, and of what is acceptable as a knowledge claim; detailed knowledge – and competent application of – at least one method; critical analysis of one of the standard methods in your discipline showing that you understand both its strengths and its limitations; [Theory] understanding of key theoretical strands and theoretical concepts in your discipline; understanding how theory shapes your research question; ability to contribute something useful to the theoretical debate in your area; [Miscellaneous] ability to do all the above yourself, rather than simply doing what your supervisor tells you; awareness of where your work fits in relation to the discipline, and what it contributes to the discipline; mature overview of the discipline.” 

As Lubomir observes, too many people are awarded a PhD degree despite the fact that the doctoral programs where they get an education don’t provide them with the requisite skills. The Rugg and Petre list doesn’t cover all the skills and experience one expects in a senior researcher or a major contributor to a field. These are the basics — the necessary and sufficient skills for a PhD, the degree that we expect in someone who will undertake a research career.

Now, David notes that there is a great deal of pressure on PhD students to come up with new knowledge. This is true, in that we expect PhD students to make an original contribution to the knowledge of the field in which they take a doctorate. But this is not a “great deal of pressure” for someone who has developed the skills that Rugg and Petre describe.

The pressure — if any — arises from incompetent supervising and from the often unrealistic expectations loaded onto students by troubled PhD programs. In some schools, for example, I understand that PhD students are required to publish journal articles as a condition for graduating. To me, this seems inappropriate. While it is good to publish if one can do so, it should not be a requirement for graduation. (In some universities, this requirement is used as a way to increase the publications of doctoral supervisors who require their students to publish while demanding that their students add the supervisor signatures to all articles. They do this even when they have not done the work that a signature credit requires. That’s another issue, but it is part of the inappropriate kinds of pressure that doctoral students face in poor programs.)   

Despite inappropriate pressures at poor programs, there are reasonable ways to contribute new knowledge to any field. 

This doesn’t mean that new knowledge will dramatically change the nature of a field or transform the way we understand something. While such PhD theses do come up, they are rare. Terry Winograd’s (1971) PhD thesis at MIT is a good example of a PhD thesis that helped to shift the direction of his field. Winograd’s thesis was so important that it was swiftly published as an entire issue of the journal Cognitive Psychology (Winograd 1972). 

On discussion lists in design, I also see Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1922) Tractatus offered as an example, but that’s not a reasonable argument. Wittgenstein published his Tractatus in German in 1921, with an English edition appearing in 1922. When Cambridge wanted to hire him, the lack of a PhD was considered an impediment, even though he was already a renowned philosopher. His colleagues at the university decided that he should submit the Tractatus as his PhD thesis. The examiner wrote: “It is my personal opinion that Mr. Wittgenstein’s thesis is a work of genius but be that as it may, it is certainly well up to the standard required for the Cambridge degree of Doctor of Philosophy” (Monk 1991: 272). Wittgenstein was awarded his PhD for a book published six years earlier. The Tractatus is often considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. Most PhD students in design do not return to university at the age of 40 to present a widely acknowledged book written a decade earlier as a thesis. Design students generally seek a PhD soon after completing an undergraduate studio degree and a master’s degree — usually finishing the PhD in their early or mid-20s.

But no one is holding the average PhD student to the level of a Winograd or a Wittgenstein. At any good university, we expect a decent and responsible thesis. Most of us earn decent, workaday PhD degrees with a decent, workaday thesis. It’s what we do later that begins to shape our real contribution — and many of us take years to hit our stride.

While a good PhD take work, there is no pressure on students to come up with more new knowledge than one can reasonably expect in a decent thesis. Rowena Murray (2002) and Estelle Phillips and Derek Pugh (2000) have both described what we expect.

Phillips and Pugh (2000: 63-64) offer a useful list of 15 different kinds of new knowledge that warrant the PhD award: “1) Setting down a major piece of new information in writing for the first time. 2) Continuing a previously original piece of work. 3) Carrying out original work designed by the supervisor. 4) Providing a single original technique, observation, or result in an otherwise unoriginal but competent piece of research. 5) Having many original ideas, methods, and interpretations, all performed by others under the direction of the postgraduate. 6) Showing originality on testing somebody else's ideas. 7) Carrying out empirical work that has not been done before. 8) Making a synthesis that has not been made before. 9) Using already known material but with a new interpretation. 10) Trying out something in [one] country that has previously only been done in other countries. 11) Taking a particular technique and applying it to a new area. 12) Bringing new evidence to bear on an old issue. 13) Being cross-disciplinary and using different [methods]. 14) Looking at areas that people in the discipline have not looked at before. 15) Adding to knowledge in a way that has not been done before.” 

Murray (2002: 52) gives this list of criteria for an original contribution to the knowledge of the field — the kind of new knowledge that merits a PhD: “You say something no one has said before; You do empirical work that has not been done before; You synthesize things that have not been put together before; You make a new interpretation of someone else's material [or] ideas; You do something in this country that has only been done elsewhere; You take an existing technique and apply it to a new area; You work across disciplines, using different methodologies; You look at topics that people in your discipline have not looked at; You test existing knowledge in an original way; You add to knowledge in a way that has not been done before; You write down a new piece of information for the first time; You give a good exposition of someone else's idea; You continue an original piece of work.” 

Whatever one may say with respect to the other issues in earlier threads, I want to put forward a simple thought. There are many kinds of new knowledge. Anyone who can acquire the skills that Rugg and Petre (2004: 6-7) define should be able to contribute the kind of new knowledge that warrants a PhD without undue pressure. 

As a field, we ought to think more deeply on what we mean when we speak of knowledge — and we clearly should give more thought to doctoral education when it leads to the kinds of problems that David and Lubomir describe.

Yours,

Ken Friedman

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References

Greco, John. 2010. Achieving Knowledge. A Virtue-Theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Press, pp. 4-10.

Monk, Ray. 1991. Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books.

Murray, Rowena. 2002. How to Write a Thesis. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open University Press.

Phillips, Estelle M., and Derek S. Pugh. 2000. How to Get a PhD. A Handbook for Students and their Supervisors. Third Edition. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Rugg, Gordon, and Marian Petre. 2004. The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research. Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press. 

Winograd, Terry. 1971. Procedures as a Representation for Data in a Computer Program for Understanding Natural Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Winograd, Terry. 1972. "Understanding Natural Language.” Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 3. No. 1, January 1972, pp. 1-191.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., Ltd.

—

Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/

Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Visiting Professor | Faculty of Engineering | Lund University ||| Email  [log in to unmask] | Academia https://tongji.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn 

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