People Disagree about Important Issues
You'll find contrasting arguments in your research. That's great!
In many classes, and in most of grade school, instructors and textbooks organize themselves around presenting a particular view of a topic. Sometimes, those choices are invisible to students, as when an instructor decides not to include a particular perspective or theory. At other times, there’s a fig leaf of even-handedness, like when a popular or widespread theory is brought up only to be shown that it’s a wafer-thin fallacy.
Okay—it’s not always that bad. In some classes and contexts, there is a real and genuine debate, and that will be presented evenly. But there’s also good reasons why these are somewhat exceptional cases: most of the time, the goal of a class is to help students master a particular body of material or arguments, not to engross them in the debates surrounding all of that. And even classes structured entirely around debates and controversies will make some decisions about what arguments to include, and in doing so they’ll be taming and domesticating the real arguments out there. In a course, after all, there’s only so many weeks and so much time you can ask students to devote to that class.
Writing a thesis is different. In writing a thesis, you’re going to come face to face with the real range of debates and opinions. Instead of there being just one story that you’re learning, or even neatly separated representatives for different points of view, suddenly it will seem like there’s chaos. Why is everyone arguing with each other? Who’s agreeing with whom? Why do some articles and books support one position partially and then another position not at all?
This is a big issue, and it’s one we’ll be talking about a lot in this newsletter. Right now, we just want to address the single biggest point: The existence of scholarly disagreements isn’t evidence of failure. It’s an indication about how important a topic is.
People disagree about important issues. If something is really unimportant, then there’s a good chance nobody will expend the energy to figure out if they agree or disagree at all! When something does matter, however, then every part of the contending positions will be picked over, and any weak point will have arguments trained on it to reduce it to rubble in an attempt to level the claim of which it’s a part.
Indeed, the history of any scholarly field is basically a history of people disagreeing with each other. Evolution, cosmology, voting behavior, inflation—you name it, and if if it’s a big topic the disagreements are huge. Some of those disagreements cover the findings themselves; sometimes they cover the arguments used to support evidence everyone agrees on but they disagree about what it means. Sometimes the disagreement ranges over what a definition of the problem is, or what methods could be reliably employed to establish what evidence would be reliable. All of these, and more, are up for debate.
As a thesis writer, your job is to find what axis of these disagreements you’re contributing to. That means identifying what your contribution is going to be. It could be refining a method, or bringing a new dataset to bear, or extensively tracing the microdynamics of a particular case to see if claimed theories are really working as they’re supposed to be. Whatever happens, a good thesis will take part in this conversation and try to make a direct contribution to that argument. You won’t stop people from disagreeing, but you can make the disagreements better.
The takeaway: Doing research independently means that you’re going to confront a much fuller range of scholarly opinions and assessments than you would in a class. You should accept this but also keep trying to focus in on the claims that matter most for what you’re doing.
The practical: Keep a running list of what you’ve read along with notes about how you think a given book or article fits into the question you’re investigating.
You may also find these posts useful:
“The Limits of Originality” Be clear in working with your adviser—and be clear in talking to yourself—about what you will be contributing that will be “original” and what existing tools (or data, interpretations, approaches—whatever!) will be based upon what others have done.
“Don’t Write a Literature Review” Literature reviews are like flytraps: the unwary can get trapped in other people’s arguments instead of building their own. Remember that you’re not here to “promote” what others have said. Your job is to set the stage for what you will say. Synthesize and critique (always citing!) and move on to your own argument.
“The Scholarly Literature” Identifying “good” research begins by recognizing that single pieces of published, peer-reviewed scholarship are best understood as part of a lineage of scholarly work. Simply finding one or a handful of such papers or books will give students a rough snapshot of the sandbox in which they are playing, but only by reading widely and deeply will they understand the contours and nuances of the task at hand.