Defending truth, one dissertation at a time
We live in a time in which truth, or at least our best interpretation of it, is under siege. While I was on vacation this week, away from my work as an academic, and strolling the acropolis where ancient Greek philosophers set the foundations of western pursuit of knowledge, I couldn’t help but reflect on my role in our modern war on truth. Am I a soldier? A commander? A factory owner?
Whatever my role, it must be a mundane one. The particulars of defending truth are messy and slow. Nowhere is this more true then in my role in evaluating dissertations, which is an annual event in springtime, when a few doctoral students present to me their 300 page documents for final approval. I spend dozens of hours combing, sentence by sentence, for unsubstantiated claims, logical fallacies, overstated interpretations, and misinterpretations of data. This is not glamorous work: it requires vigilance, patience, and a cutting, relentless reasoning of language and logic. And the result is often of the form of a thesis statement, a single declarative sentence that states what the dissertation’s author believes to be true because of the arguments and/or data the dissertation presents.
What I find most fascinating about this process, however, is not the work itself, but it’s surrounding incentives. There is nearly nothing incentivizing me to do this job well. The work takes time (that I don’t have). It requires the best of my attention (which is scarce). The doctoral student wants to graduate, take a job, and move on, creating social pressure for me to minimize critique and revision. The dissertation itself might only be read by a few doctoral students in the next 40 years. In my field, much of the work has already been published, making the dissertation feel perfunctory. And because it has been published, I have probably already read much of its content. There’s
Quite literally the only incentive to be rigorous in evaluating a dissertation is my greater internal drive to defend of truth. While any individual dissertation’s veracity may have little effect on truth, the cumulative neglect of truth would eventually erode institutions of knowledge. After all, what institution, other than academia, is so centrally concerned with lasting truths about nature? Not industry. Not government. Not journalism, which focuses on the first draft of history, not the last. Rigorously evaluating dissertations is how I enact a defense of truth.
Perhaps it is this invisible, toiling, detailed work that makes truth so hard to defend in public. Facts look easy. All it takes to make claim look true is to state it confidently. What it takes to produce actual facts that withstand decades, even centuries, is years of careful, attentive research and the entire institution of academia to give me the intrinsic drive and purpose to produce it, and train others to produce it. The result is that claims are abundant but facts are rare. Quite rare.
And so this Spring, I will read carefully. I will ask for revisions from graduating doctoral students. I will use the occasion to give them their final lessons in epistemology before they join the front lines in calling bullshit.
