Authoring a PhD

Louis Pasteur
30
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the 
submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf
31
Strengthening your motivation for doing original thinking is
important too. Making a commitment of some kind – to an
intellectual approach, a particular school of thought in your
discipline, or a broad world view – all these can be helpful 
in suggesting an angle of attack for you, as the quote from
Hamilton below suggests. Of course, you will always need to
retain a capacity for relational argument. You must be able to
recognize when a view you might want to hold is not credible
or defensible. But so long as these conditions are met, the impe-
tus provided by a reasoned commitment can be a helpful spur
to ingenuity, encouraging you to look harder for particular
ways of surmounting difficulties. Again some students who take
an empiricist or ‘common sense’ view of what they are doing in
their doctorates find this advice hard to apply to their work. But
there is no worthwhile ‘purely factual’ research, even in the
physical sciences.
Those who stand for nothing, fall for anything.
Alexander Hamilton
32
Making a commitment does not entail 
over
-theorizing your
work, or linking it to unnecessarily high-flown ideas with 
little relevance to the value-added elements of the dissertation.
Avoiding extraneous materials is an important part of keeping
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the thesis question in close sync with your research answers and
appropriately managing readers’ expectations. Your theoretical
exposition should always be proportional to the value-added that
you can credibly claim for your research. Nothing disrupts the fit
between question and answer in a thesis more effectively than 
a theoretical framework which functions only as a heteronomous
cog, a part of the analysis that turns and turns but never engages
with anything else.
‘It is relatively easy to build up a theory of the world’,
remarked the theologian Teilhard de Chardin.
33
But perhaps he
was in an unusual category of persons. Doing genuinely new
theory at PhD level is now very difficult in all of the humani-
ties and social science disciplines. Their intellectual apparatuses
have grown and extended a great deal in the last half century.
The large empty spaces and opportunities for making major
intellectual advances available earlier on have tended to be col-
onized. So relying on doing original theorizing should only
form an integral part of your doctoral planning if you have very
many confirming signals from your supervisors and colleagues
that this is an area where you have some strong comparative
advantage.
Still it is important to balance a reasoned scepticism about
your ability to transcend some established limitations with the
need to be a little bit ambitious, to stretch and push your capa-
bilities in empirical analysis, or methodological work, or theo-
retical or thematic efforts. Until you try to do something a bit 
different or ‘out of the box’, how can you ever succeed? Unless
you push yourself to do a bit more it will be hard to establish
your genuine intellectual limits. There is now very good evidence
that those people who do the most original work are generally
less cautious than the ordinary run of scholars. Creative people
tend to be more persistent and dedicated in their efforts, less 
put off by initial reverses or disappointments. They are also more
sanguine or overoptimistic about their prospects of success than
perhaps may seem ‘rational’. They are more prone to dream of
making big advances, which helps them to soldier on rather
than be put off by barriers in their way (see Elster below).
Creative people also find ways of underestimating the difficul-
ties in their way. As Hirschman says, they mentally scale down
the hurdles they need to surmount or the levels of effort 
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associated with different elements of their work. Perhaps they
also compress the time-scales involved.
Creativity always comes as a surprise to us: we can
never count on it and we dare not believe in it until
it has happened. In other words, we would not 
consciously engage upon those tasks whose success
clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming.
Hence, the only way in which we can bring our 
creative resources into full play is by misjudging the
nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves 
as more routine, simple and undemanding of 
creativity than it will turn out to be.