LSE's doctoral prizes and the question of what makes a thesis good

Academic prizes usually mark the end of a career: the recognition of a lifetime's work.

The doctoral prizes of the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics stand somewhere else. They recognise work done at the beginning of a career.

At first glance that looks like a small difference. It is not. For a young researcher, a first piece of international visibility is the threshold on which the rest of an academic path depends.

Why this department, of all departments#

As its name suggests, the LSE's philosophy department is not a conventional one: Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method.

The name is no accident; the department's founding tradition goes back to Karl Popper, who was professor of logic and scientific method at the LSE, and whose The Logic of Scientific Discovery and The Open Society and Its Enemies are among the turning points of twentieth-century philosophy of science and political philosophy.

Carried on by Imre Lakatos and John Watkins, that line made the department one of the world's leading centres in the philosophy of science.

Today the department works in philosophy of science, logic, decision theory, moral philosophy and political philosophy — and does so interlocked with the LSE's departments of economics, political science and law.

What the criteria say#

The prizes' published criteria fall under three heads, and each of them is an answer to an argument going on in the academy today.

Originality#

Making a new contribution to the field. That is the classic definition of a doctoral thesis, but it grows harder to satisfy. As the philosophical literature swells, being "new" becomes more difficult.

That the prize should put this criterion first is a stand against the habit of turning thesis-writing into a summary of the literature.

Technical competence#

Rigour of argument and soundness of method. A thesis may advance an interesting claim, but if the argument for it is weak its value is limited.

This is the LSE tradition showing through directly: Popper's whole programme rested on the demand that a theory be set out in a falsifiable form.

Interdisciplinary contribution#

This is the most striking criterion of the three. What is rewarded is the connection philosophy makes with other fields — science, economics, politics, law.

It is consistent with the LSE's institutional shape. But it also indicates a more general tendency: philosophy is ceasing to be a discipline closed in on itself.

Most of the subjects we have followed this term — the relation of the philosophy of mathematics to physics, the epistemology of artificial intelligence, the meeting of logic with the philosophy of religion — belong to the same tendency.

Seen from Turkey#

Turkey has no institutionalised, visible tradition of prizes for doctoral theses in philosophy. Universities run their own internal incentives, but there is no structure recognised across the field.

Such a prize would serve two functions.

The first is visibility for young researchers. The second — and the more important — is setting a standard. The criteria of a prize state openly what counts as good work in a field.

That is the instructive part of the LSE example: the prize does not merely pick a name; it describes what a good thesis looks like.

Structures are becoming established in Turkey — the network of refereed publication is widening, as our map of the journals showed. The next step might be a mechanism of recognition that makes the young researcher visible.

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The department's current prize announcements and conditions of entry are published at lse.ac.uk/philosophy.