Hegel argues that the history of change is one of opposing ideas and their convergence into new levels of understanding. These, Hegelian Dialectics start with a taken-for-granted truth, a thesis. The opposition then presents a disclaimer to this thesis: i.e. an antithesis. Antitheses cast doubt on the thesis through a myriad of paths. However, all of these introduce a tension with the thesis. This tension eventually finds resolution when a synthesis comes along and provides a new understanding. This new understanding encompasses a theory within which the prior taken-for-granted ideas and the new changes are resolved and articulated in a coherent manner. From this new understanding, the process starts again.
Hegel's model has been applied to a variety of ideas. Hegel to freedom, Marx to the economy, Weber to bureaucracy, Schumpeter to innovation, and many more. Although Thomas Kuhn did not employ dialectics in his theory of scientific revolutions, the dynamics at play follow the same pattern as in Hegel's work. Indeed as Hegel called it, the dialectical is "the only true method" of scholarly and scientific exposition.
Here, I am to rehash Hegelian dialectics but at a smaller level; at the level of the scientific contribution. I will show how the main components of a contribution serve as forces that drive a Hegelian cycle. In doing so, I aim to clear up the connections that drive the audience of this dialogue to go through each step and arrive at new levels of understanding. Hegel assumed that our Geist would endlessly push towards self-actualization. I live in a time in which "the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks", but we still need to go forward. I feel the framework below can show us how.
Scientific contributions are what drives the engine of scientific development. Yet, only a minuscule subset of all scientific work pushes forth a relevant scientific contribution. The scientific method starts with observation, builds questions, refines them into hypotheses, tests them, and checks them into compiled results. These results might lead to a contribution but seldom do. That said, it is a scholar's craft to learn what routes can lead to fruitful results and pack them so that their field changes. Some fields have more direct paths than others. Think of the 5k+ scientists at CERN who worked for over 40 years to contribute one number--125.11 ± 0.11 GeV/c2--to science. They did an incredible contribution to science, but still, their effort gave Peter Higgs, not them, the Nobel prize for theorizing the particle's existence.
As in the case of Peter Higgs, scholarly careers are built on theory. Furthermore, theory's brick and mortar are made of scientific contributions. Scientific contributions themselves are composed of sub-elements, necessary but not sufficient parts that garner an audience's attention. Indeed, a scholar's only job is to craft a contribution that is interesting, valid, and important enough to grab its audience attention long enough to cycle through all stages of the Hegelian dialectic cycle. Below, I present my inherited and paraphrased understanding of how to do just that. All credit goes to Hart Posen, all errors go to my secretary.
Whose line is it anyway?
Science is "the show where everything is [real, yet most] don't matter!". Even the best scientific contribution is irrelevant to most scholars. Yet, some science does change the world. For example, in 2017, most scholars could not be bothered by learning that a _"single model with 165 million parameters, achieves 27.5 BLEU on English-to-German translation"_. Yet, the paper that claimed this finding has created trillions of Dollars of market capitalization in the intervening years. Back in the day, only a few hundred people could understand the paper in detail. But those who could were blown away so hard that they made many of us have a look, and eventually changed our lives. Indeed, as the authors claimed, sometimes Attention is All you Need.
Audience
Attention is grabbed by surprising an audience that cares for what you just found out. But to do so, a scientist first needs to find this audience. This is not trivial. As scientists, our job is often that of an iconoclast. We look for objects people love and show them their lack of value. We then dare to convince them to love a new icon we crafted. Finding people who accept our repetitive and relentless breaking and crafting of icons takes effort. However, only if we find the right audience will our actions be accepted and valued.
To motivate the audience to accept your contribution, we need to do more than simply state the facts. We need to provide something that makes the audience "suspend their disbelief." This needs to be intuitive to the audience and worth their while.
Schopenhauer stated that all "truth passes through three stages: first, it Is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident". But he forgot to tell us how to make the audience perform all this work. For most, it is easiest to disregard a claim and carry on as if nothing happened. Below I present three key forces that motivate audiences to churn the whole dialectical cycle. I motivate why a contribution to bring a new level of understanding needs to be surprising, valid, and important. It is to these that we now turn.
Surprising
Huh
As scholars, our goal when introducing our contribution is to cause that little sound to emerge deep in our readers' minds. Our job is to make the audience wonder, hold their breath for a second, and wait enough to let us share more. To do this, we need some form of surprise. To do this, we need two things: a thesis and an antithesis that contrast the audience's original taken-for-granted ideas.
Thesis
A thesis is a taken-for-granted idea our audience holds. This notion must be polished and sharpened enough for the audience to accept it at face value. The author cannot be condescending or even try to flatter the audience. The idea is to put down a well-known piece of knowledge simply; a foundation from which to start the dialogue. One needs to craft it for an audience, but broadly speaking, it is a recollection of what one believes the audience holds as true. If done well, the audience will see it as valid, if not, the strawman will be easy enough to dismantle and save everyone's time.
Antithesis
The antithesis presents a counterpoint to the thesis. It encapsulates a departure from the thesis and articulates why this departure cannot be assumed to be just a simple case of the thesis. There are dozens of ways to create an antithesis. Some oppose the thesis more than others, some simply refine prior theories, and none simply validates or extends the realm of the thesis.
The break between the null state presented in the thesis and the new concept detailed in the antithesis cannot be too small, as it would be considered a trifle, an idea not even worth noting. It cannot be too big, as it would be seen as absurd and not worth noting. It needs to inhabit a "Goldilocks zone" that keeps people engaged but not enraged.
Scientific contributions are forms of controlled iconoclasm. You want to remodel a chapel or break a statue, but you don't want to destroy the church—not immediately, at least.
Valid
Even if the contribution avoids ridicule and disregard, it must be validated. The audience needs to feel the truth behind it. These are experts, people who know everything there is to know about the field, the antithesis tries to undermine. The contribution needs to let them feel why it makes sense. It is here that the audience needs to be "willing to suspend disbelief." The contribution needs to give them some hunch that feels true to them, true enough to let the implications linger in their minds. In some ways, it allows their minds to jump to the synthesis but just for a second; more is needed for a true exodus.
Important
Any new idea will be opposed. People are busy adding new cute ideas; however, being astute and clever won't matter. A contribution needs to be important. Importance can be of many types. But just as validity, one can feel it in one's gut. Where validity feels like a "ok I buy that", importance feels like "oh shit, if that is true...". Importance makes us drop what we are doing, and we hope the author provides a solution for the naive mistake we have been carrying in our heads.
Importance, conditional on validity, and surprise will lead the audience through a dialectic cycle and towards synthesis. However, importance can also be seen as the motivation for the audience to step away from the thesis and into the synthesis.
Synthesis
The outcome of the dialectical process is a new level of understanding. In this, the ideas of the thesis and antithesis are combined into a new, better theory. After spending their time reading our work, the audience arrives here. They cannot go back to the thesis. They live in a new and evidently better world.
House of Cards
Hegel's dialectics are built of triangles whose three edges are connected by forces --surprise, validity, and importance-- that keep the audience engaged and willing to walk the talk. These forces determine the area of the triangle. Some contributions are broader, some are taller. Some are acute, some obtuse.
Below, I will provide some examples of such triangles, how I feel they are connected, and help science grow.
Human Resource Triangles
The example employs a couple of papers that expand the resource-based view as presented by Barney (1991). In all cases, the synthesis provides a combination of social and human capital to redefine the role of human resources in the initial formulations.
Coff(1997)
In 1991, Jay Barney introduced the resource-based view. People could be resources as they could know things that other companies might not. Barney could not really make human resources fit well in the theory, so the only human resources were the ones who knew things but did not know why these things worked out well. It's kind of a cop out, but no paper is a field in itself. Good papers open up new lines of work, and that Barney did.
Barney's work caused an upheaval. By the mid-90s, there was a huge audience when Russ Coff came and said that people are not oil fields. You cannot just sell them away and expect them to work just as well. This idea required the use of social capital and the development of ways to keep this resource happy to produce for the firm.
Coff's work then used this observation to provide a roadmap for "coping with hazards on the road to resource-based theory." This new synthesis brought a new understanding that has opened the door to thousands of new scientific works. The state of the resource-based view has changed dramatically since Coff's work, but his contribution still holds the weight of this house of cards.
Audience: RBV scholars who read Becker
Surprising: Humans are not oil fields
Valid: Yes, I am not an oil field
Important: Shit, the people I sold might stop working
Correidora & Rosenkopf (2010)
Their work is similar to Coff's, but they noticed a specific problem in RBV. Namely, former employees actually serve as an asset to the firm. They can check the firm's work and even give information the firm might lack. This idea of a bidirectional edge was kind of weird. But it made a lot of sense to its audience, composed of scholars who move around and continue to email the colleagues they leave behind. So clearly, RBV needed correction.
Audience: RBV scholars who read Becker
Surprise: People don't die when they leave the firm. They might even continue to talk to their former colleagues.
Valid: Yes, I am alive and other universities have employed me. I like the people who work there still.
Important: Shit, I fire anyone who talks to prior employees.
Groshjean, Kober, & Zucchini (2016)
They found something similar to C&R. One hockey player said he did not like playing against his prior team. He was fine in his new job, but going against the Edmonton team was hard. It's the same as C&R, but here, the problem is not information; instead, the employees themselves actually work less to try to avoid hurting their friends.
Audience: RBV scholars who read Correidora and Rosenkopf
Surprising: People might feel bad hurting people they like, even if they are competitors
Valid: Yes, a sports person said that. In sport I trust.
Important: Shit, how can I force them to compete more?
Crafting space
In all three cases, the new understanding required adding social and emotional constructs to the resource-based view. These provide a solid convergent view that can serve as a foundation for new theory. As all cases have a similar synthesis, we can see a form of convergence that creates a solid foundation to our new theories. Indeed, no paper is a field but a few together can be.
I see this process of building triangles and joining them at the top as the mechanism through which science grows. Triangles are strong, and this process cannot be two-dimensional. Pile three of them together, and you get the smallest three-dimensional solid, the tetrahedron.
I believe this is how science grows, at least until audiences move and change their interests. If enough triangles reinforce themselves, new structures will emerge, and science will continue growing. It might be triangles all the way up..
Note: I know the figure above is not multi-dimensional, but this made more sense somehow.
Holy Trinity
Overall, the idea that scientific contributions require an element of surprise, have a form of face validity, and feel important to the reader makes sense to me. For what I understand, three logics rule how we think of the world: the logic of absurdity, the logic of appropriateness, and the logic of consequence (Similar to Susan Sontag's three sensibilities: camp, feeling, and seriousness).
These three exhaustive logics provide direct connections to what makes the dialectical cycle go round. We start with a surprise, a form of restrained absurdity. We continue reading as the claim seems appropriate to the reader's worldview. However, the only way it is valued as a contribution is if, in all seriousness, the audience sees this as consequential and important to their work.
What matters to me is not the trinity of concepts, but how they connect to the perennial discussion started by Hegel. The world is changing. It goes through new paradigms and revolutions. Sure. But how does one keep the reader from reading something else? How do we make them suspend their disbelief and "read and find out"? Here the answer is clear: By giving them an interesting, valid, and important argument, a real contribution.
This view of a contribution helps me allocate my time in a rewarding way. It helps me look at prior work and try to engage in the debates they engaged in. Doing science is nice, but being part of the community is the reason why I stay here.
I am grateful for this new understanding of the dynamics behind a scientific contribution. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman":
I have a friend who’s an artist... He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,... I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
The same applies here. You could read the deconstruction of a scientific contribution as a way of making a beautiful thing dull. But for me, it is a way of seeing things more deeply and being awed, once again, by the work of the people on whose shoulders I stand.
Thank you Hart.
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