Put the “Ph” Back in PhD

Re:Put the “Ph” Back in PhD by Fede_V on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @06:16AM (#10620160)

Yeah, pretty much exactly this. In the abstract, I fully support teaching science PhDs more about Quine, Russell, Popper, Carnap - they are all great thinkers who had very intelligent ideas. In practice, PhDs at top tier institutions are far too concerned with the day to day rat race that the history of ideas is not likely to be a serious priority.

As long as the competition for stable positions will remain so fierce, and the criteria for which candidates are judged will remain so narrow, the problems are likely to be far more prosaic than those raised by analytical philosophers.

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Re:Put the “Ph” Back in PhD by cryoshon on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @09:47AM (#10620978)

The last academic shop I was at had an Eritrean biostatistician around who was the only actual philosopher of science in the entire troupe. He understood the different perspectives of epistemology as well as statistical analysis, and was a tremendous asset in planning new studies for the most high impact data... unfortunately, to many of the postdocs and PIs, he was just an annoyance, because they refused to accept that their studies were poorly constructed and their data was less than rigorous.

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Re:Put the “Ph” Back in PhD by jamesrcole on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @07:51AM (#10620388)

> In practice, ...

You're arguing that what happens to be the case now is how it should be.

Do you think this is the best way for it to be, and if so, why?

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Re:Put the “Ph” Back in PhD by Fede_V on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @08:55AM (#10620664)

Absolutely no. However, as the parent comment pointed out, the root problem is the broken incentives - the lack of philosophical sophistication of scientists is at best a 3rd order term.

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