Like many other people I know, I got seriously hung up in grad school at the dissertation stage. Writing term papers was one thing. I knew how to do that. But writing a dissertation? I felt more or less completely lost for about 2-3 years. Because I've seen so many grad students get stuck at roughly the same stage, I thought I'd make a multi-post tutorial on how to write a dissertation. Please be forewarned: the tips I will give are purely lessons/suggestions that I believe may be helpful. I have little doubt some of you out there will disagree with some, or even much, of what I have to say. Hopefully, those who do disagree will post comments. My hope is that, if anything, my posts on the subject will generate some discussion.
On the Importance of Dissertations
I'm going to begin my discussion by getting on my soap-box for a minute. I've heard that many departments -- including my alma mater (Arizona) -- are moving away from requiring actual dissertations, and are instead accepting a handful of papers (so-called "star papers") as sufficient for the PhD. I think this is a mistake for at least two reasons.
First, as I've written elsewhere and others have remarked as well, our entire discipline is arguably becoming overly specialized. There seems an ever-growing trend in the direction of "smaller", nuts-and-bolts-type thinking, and away from grand, systematic ideas. I don't think this is a good trend, and I think the "star paper" approach only feeds into it. Learning how to put together and develop a Big Idea is an important thing to learn, and I think it needs to be learned early on (i.e. before one becomes a prof). If you don't learn how to develop a Big Idea in grad school, when will you learn? Your first several years after grad school you're trying to publish standalone papers, so you won't learn it then. What about after you get tenure? Will you suddenly learn how to develop Big Ideas then, after you've spent your entire time in grad school and your professional life before tenure developing Small Ideas? Again, probably not. Our discipline should try to generate Big Thinkers, and there's just no better time to begin developing Big Thinking skills than in grad school, through writing a dissertation.
Second -- and I'm sure I'll take some heat for this -- I think dissertations build character and are important as a test of will. Writing small papers involves a certain amount of discipline, stress, and risk. It's very hard to write a good paper, as we all know, but if a single paper "goes down the tubes" one can always write another one. Not so for dissertations. There are times during a dissertation when it looks like the whole thing will crash and burn, and when this happens one must find a way. Or sometimes one must scrap the whole thing a begin again. Writing good "star papers" is hard. Writing a halfway decent dissertation is very, very, very hard. It is a surpreme test of will, and a test that I think benefits us in the end. Because if you think grad school is hard, you have no idea. Being a professor is far more difficult. One needs to know how to really push oneself to the brink. This is no joke. You never have enough time as a professor. You need to learn how to do more than you think you can. And I think writing a dissertation helps one learn this. I can't tell you how many times during my dissertation I thought to myself, or even said out loud, "I don't think I can do this." I've never said this about single papers. I've always thought I could do those. And it's because of this difference that I think dissertations are important. It's because, next to a dissertation, the only thing that's ever led me to say, "I don't think I can do this", is being a professor. It's better to learn that one can do what appears "impossible" as a grad student than to try to learn it as a professor. Because if you didn't learn how to do the "impossible" as a grad student you may well sink instead of swim as a prof. Those, anyway, are my thoughts. Dissertations are horrible to suffer through...but I think they enable one to swim later on.
How Not to Find a Good Topic
Finding a good dissertation topic is probably the single most difficult part of getting a PhD in philosophy. It took me about three years to find a good topic -- three years of completely spinning my wheels -- and the vast majority of students I've seen have trouble finishing the PhD got hung up at this very stage. Why is it so difficult?
Prior to writing a dissertation, grad school taught you how to write individual papers. Finding a topic for a single paper is hard enough. Now, all of a sudden, you need to find a single, great book-length topic. Nothing you've done so far in grad school prepares you for it...and yet, somehow, you have to figure it out. Actually, things are much worse than this -- for in my experience writing graduate level term-papers positively mis-prerares you to find a good dissertation topic. Let me explain why.
Let's reflect for a moment on how one typically arrives at a term-paper topic. I'm probably oversimplifying, but if I remember right the process goes something like this: You read some papers in Field X. You find an argument/position in Field X that you don't think works very well, but which you think you can improve on. What you do then is write a term paper laying out that argument/position, criticizing it, and finally, having your say. This is no way to go about trying to formulate a dissertation topic. I'll use my own case to illustrate.
When I started out trying to formulate a dissertation topic, I decided I wanted to defend normative reasons internalism -- the view that all genuine normative reasons depend on the subjective states of the agent to whom those reasons apply. This view, obviously, stands opposed to normative reasons externalism, which is the view that there are normative reasons that in no way depend upon said internal states. Okay, now think for a moment about what a dissertation on this topic would entail. I would have to learn, think through, and try to refute every argument out there -- arguments already published by super-duper-smart people -- in favor of normative reasons externalism. What a mountain to try to climb!
I've rarely seen a dissertation of this sort succeed. This isn't to say it can't be done...but I will say I've never seen it done. Here, then, is my first piece of advice:
Suggestion #1 -- Don't Focus in on a Big Issue or Big Position Prematurely: you'll never get your dissertation started, let alone done, if you task yourself with having to refute everything that's ever been written on a particular side of a well-established issue. That is too tall, and too steep, of a mountain to climb.
How to Find a Good Topic
Suggestion #2 -- You have to find a Big Idea: Every successful dissertation that I've come across is based upon a Big Idea. My dissertation's Big Idea was to systematically apply John Rawls' original position to the domain of nonideal theory. Other Big Ideas I've come across include: viewing moral theories as *advice*-giving, understanding and evaluating political theories on the basis of cutting-edge empirical psychology, etc.
There's a simple reason why it's important to find that Big Idea: once you find it, the dissertation more or less writes itself. After all, once you find your Big Idea, you don't need to "refute" every existing argument in the literature on your topic. All you have to do is show how your Big Idea illuminates the topic in ways that the existing arguments in the literature generally miss. In other words, the Big Idea makes things easy for you. Instead of attempting the near-impossible (refuting every other smart person out there), your dissertation aims to change the conversation (or at least show a different way of looking at the conversation).
Suggestion #3 -- To Find a Big Idea, Read...and Read Widely: "Okay," you say, "I realize I should try to find my Big Idea...but that's easier said than done! How am I supposed to find it?" In my experience, one primary reason grad students have trouble finding their Big idea is that they ran afoul of Suggestion #1 above ("Don't pick a Big Issue or Big Position"). After all, here's what happens after you fix in on a Big Issue or Big Position. You read that literature, and try to come up with your Idea. The problem with this is: you might not have a Big Idea on your favorite Big Issue! I had this problem myself. As I said, early on I had my mind made up: I wanted to defend normative reasons internalism. So what did I do? I read everything I could on the subject and tried to come up with my Idea. And I failed. Much later on, after a rejected disseration topic, one of my profs at Arizona, Mark Timmons, told me, "Just read." I took Mark to mean: don't just read on your favorite issues. Read other things. And so I did. I set aside normative reasons internalism and started reading political philosophy. I read a bunch of stuff on legitimacy. Then I read, and re-read, Rawls' A Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism, and The Law of Peoples...and at last my Big Idea came to me.
The lesson I took from this is that you never know where your Big Idea will come from. If you have your mind made up about the Big Issue you want your dissertation to be about early on, you're dramatically narrowing your chances of finding a good Big Idea. If you read, and read widely, about many different topics, the greater your chances of finding your Idea. The larger the net, the more likely you'll catch a fish.
I hope you all found this discussion interesting, and I'm curious to see what y'all have to say. More later.
Let me second the recommendation to read and read widely. At USC (and many other places, I'm sure) graduate students are required to pass a 3rd year area exam. You pick some relatively broad area of philosophy and read a bunch of stuff in that area, meeting with a faculty member to talk about everything, and then take an exam on it. The goals are (i) to make sure you know your field, and (ii) to walk you into a dissertation topic, to keep you from getting hung up in just the way Marcus mentions.
As an example: I chose the practical reasoning list; this includes an ethics base list, with important historical works (Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and more) and contemporary works (Scanlon, Smith, Korsgaard, and many more), and a special practical reasoning list. People doing either the normative ethics or metaethics list (both of which further divide, and have their own base lists) also read the ethics base list.
I personally did things a bit backwards - finding a topic, then deciding on a list. But it's worked in the expected way for most people. And it was still very useful for me because (i) I didn't have a super strong background in ethics prior to working through the reading list, and (ii) even though I had the main thesis of the dissertation prior to doing the reading list, I was able to find new objections, predecessors, and applications, not to mention both questions I had to take a stand on and questions I needed to announce that I was remaining neutral on, by working through it.
Posted by: Justin Snedegar | 07/02/2012 at 04:59 PM
Justin: glad to see that you second the suggestion! I would add, though, that in my experience people tend to restrict their reading and thinking *too* much to the areas they covered in their comp exams. This is what got me stuck. I read very widely about normativity, but I wasted a great deal of time trying to come up with a Big Idea about normativity that never came. It was only when I went far afield of my reading list, reading in all different areas of ethics and political philosophy, that I reeled in my Idea -- and I've seen it happen to others too. Comp exams are "supposed" to walk you into a dissertation, but I've seen them walk many grad students down blind alleys with no exit in sight!
Posted by: Marcus Arvan | 07/02/2012 at 05:40 PM
Regarding the first part of Marcus' great post: I completely agree that there's "something" about the dissertation that you can't get via writing discrete papers (or even the "4 year plan" that some administrations are beginning to favor). My committee was clear with me that dissertation writing is about "the process." It is about going through that process, and what the experiences teach you. Having to make a unified argument over however many hundred pages you do it in gives you an experience based perspective you couldn't have gotten in the previous challenges of your graduate education. It's interesting to see how the experience of the process shapes different careers. There's some folks who follow through with their dissertation and publish it into book; some publish a few articles out of chapters and move on; others don't ever look back at their dissertation and publish all sorts of new work. In this post, I've not put my thumb on anything, really, because I don't at all have it figured out - but I do feel that there is some sense in which the dissertation process, as nutty as it can be, has a profound effect, individually, on one's outlook for the future, and greatly shapes one's profession. Now, what I'm wondering, is if someone could argue against me here, and suggest that the same sort of thing I'm trying to get my head around is also possible in the discrete papers approach or the 4 year plan? I'm open to hear.
Posted by: Kyle Whyte | 07/03/2012 at 09:03 AM
With all due respect, Dr. Arvan, since you are offering others advice on how to write a "successful" dissertation, I wonder if you consider your own dissertation "successful"? According to your other posts, you have written some 60 drafts of a paper defending the "big idea" of your diss., and it's been rejected by every journal you've sent it to (quite a large number of journals, I gather, though you haven't given a number in the posts I've read). Given this, I wonder why you think anyone should be interested in your dissertation-writing advice. I know I'm probably disrupting the "safe and supportive" atmosphere of your "cocoon" by asking these questions, but... come on, you're purporting to offer advice to more junior people on how to write a successful diss., so I don't think these questions, though they may be uncomfortable, are inappropriate. Have some self-awareness, man!
Almost everyone I know who's gotten a job was publishing diss. chapters (most of them not "star papers") while in grad school, and the rest had something accepted for publication before they went on the market. I think these people are the ones to turn to for advice.
Posted by: Ontologheist | 07/04/2012 at 06:08 AM
Ontologheist: your question, while not asked in a very friendly way, warrants an answer. Here's the short answer. The topic I chose was very, very hard. I believe it is potentially groundbreaking, and I've had many people -- including several very well-known people who've read it recently, as well as several reviewers at top journals (who, yes, nevertheless rejected it) -- tell me as much. I also had two Very Well-Known People who read it in the past few weeks assure me that the paper is important work, that it *will* get published, and that it took Awesome Philosophers X, Y, and Z several years to publish their diss work.
The problem, as I understand it, isn't that I didn't find a Great Idea. The problem is that it has taken me a great deal of time to get it right. And there's nothing wrong with that. The fact that some people publish diss chapters after a year or two, and I have not, does not make my project a failure. First, I am not merely looking to publish a paper. I am, with all due respect and humility, out to publish a "game changer." I may not succeed, but I believe I will, and I have at least some evidence in my favor. Second, different people move at different paces. It's always taken me longer than others to do things well.
At the end of the day, though, you're right. Anyone reading this blog should take my advice with a grain of salt. I offered my advice with the aim of being helpful to those who are struggling to get their darn diss off the ground -- that is, to grad students (and there are many) who feel they are in danger of failing altogether. My aim was not to say, "Look at my example--here's how to be a star.". It was: "I've seen people -- myself and others -- go from struggling to get anywhere on a diss to getting a diss *done* by doing X, Y, and Z.". My post, in other words, was intended to help The Struggling. The grad students out there who are Natural Born Stars don't need my help.
Posted by: Marcus Arvan | 07/04/2012 at 11:06 AM
Ontologheist: A quick follow-up on the last part of your post. For my part, I know very few people who published diss chapters while in grad school -- and I know a lot of quite people. Second, if you'll look at the statistics on the job market I posted earlier on this blog, a very large proportion of people who got R1 tenure-track jobs out of grad school had *no* publications whatsoever. Finally, I guess I would also like to note that although I haven't published my diss work yet, I do have several publications. While I am by no means a star, and there may be much better people to ask for advice, I believe that my advice may have some value for people. And, again, at the end of the day, everyone must choose whose advice they wish to accept. I only offer mine out of a spirit of good will.
Posted by: Marcus Arvan | 07/04/2012 at 12:16 PM
I've not heard about graduate programs substituting a bundle of "star" papers for a dissertation. How common is this practice, and what programs have implemented it?
Posted by: Trevor Hedberg | 07/05/2012 at 12:44 AM
In light of the comments of "Ontologheist." I don't think the goal of Marcus' post was to tell anyone exactly what to do. It was to share his advice based on an honest portrayal of his own experiences. Everyone is welcome to do so. And people should feel empowered to talk about their journeys. I disagree both with the purported facts on Ontologheist's comments and also with the idea that there is some single philosopher type that is the only one to turn to for advice on professional matters. What this forum shows, and what I found in my experience, is that there is so much variety out there in terms of how people's careers progress, the relation between their research talent and job status, and the sorts of things that they have learned while in different programs and having different job market experiences. Hearing someone else's experience and advice helps us reflect on our own experiences and maybe sort them out a bit better.
Posted by: Kyle Whyte | 07/05/2012 at 09:31 AM
I think Marcus's advice is especially worth hearing in this hyper-competitive environment.
In response to Ontologheist, I suggest having an angel over one shoulder, giving advice like Marcus' and telling you to only send out your best stuff, and having a devil over the other shoulder, telling you to primarily worry about getting any job at all and to "sell out" your deep interests and publish if need be. Well, that's my 2 cents.
Any way, I wanted to respond to Trevor: I think that the paper model is popular at Princeton and suggest that people just ask their advisers whether they can do this. I bet many more would say yes than people suspect.
Posted by: Brad Cokelet | 07/05/2012 at 04:34 PM
Great post (and great discussions around here generally!). Funnily enough, my own dissertation was a defense of reasons internalism, and I'm still happy I chose the topic I did. But I didn't even attempt to refute all the arguments for reasons externalism out there, and I guess I'd resist the suggestion that that's what you need to do if you tackle a hoary or somewhat over-exposed topic. I'd propose a friendly amendment to your advice which people in the know helpfully told me at the time: positive rather than negative arguments should comprise the bulk of your dissertation material, whatever you end up writing on. It is OK not to be comprehensive, in the interests of being fresh. But I'm all for the 'big idea' advice - I think that's probably key.
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Posted by: Mister Rodgers | 07/02/2015 at 01:10 PM
I find your suggestions very helpful! Could you maybe say something about how your advice applies to those who want to work on a more historical topic? I myself for instance would like to work on German idealism and am currently struggling for a Big Idea that might help me comparing different metaphysical intuitions in later idealism. So, I guess the "find a Big Idea approach" works here as well (e.g. for narrowing down the required reading), but I would love to hear your thoughts on how specifically it could in terms of historical studies.
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