Academic argumentation and critique

Author

Joseph Noonan

Published

November 30, 2024

When you apply for a PhD program and are called to an interview you will inevitably be asked a few standard questions. One of these is how you deal with critique and the second is how you deal with stress. You will of course say you deal with both wonderfully. But the reality is that both require practice. Taking and giving critique is a “soft skill” essential to being a PhD student. This also creates the ebb and flow of long solitary work followed by (semi) public exchanges where your ideas are tested. This is something that I have thought quite a bit about during the first year of my PhD. Giving and receiving critique is hard. It isn’t something you learn through doing, and very different from feedback at the lower levels of education or in other sectors. Here are some of my reflections after my first year as a Political Science PhD student.

An aspect of social science research that isn’t always explicitly articulated is that research, at its core, is an argumentative act. You are trying to convince a reader that your claims and conclusions are correct. That the inferences you draw are the correct inferences. To this end, you fend off counterpoints, and objections, and (hopefully) are transparent about your limitations. Reasoning itself is likely an argumentative and social act. Even when reasoning alone, during the solitary sections of research, you think in arguments and write in arguments. You are of course not writing an opinion article in the newspaper. You should not be aiming to convince your reader by any means necessary i.e. through omissions, or misleading interpretations.

Academic critique is about critiquing arguments. This is true even for the most quantitative methods heavy paper. A critique of how someone sets up their regression model is a critique against the accuracy of the inferences made later in the text. Everything you do, write, and present is an argument. This includes getting the reader to care about your research. Here, you argue for the relevance of your text. If you’re in political science, in your introduction within the first sentences, you will probably mention how something about your topic is essential to the functioning of the state, or democracy. You then funnel it down slowly, to the real topic at hand, which only a few dozen people in the world are deeply invested in. Finding and articulating a research gap, research question, research puzzle, or problem are all tools used to justify the importance of your research and structure your argumentation. It helps to start with a motivation that is relevant to the general world, followed by a theoretical motivation, and lastly an empirical motivation.

When you start a PhD, you will probably only have a few experiences with your work being critiqued. You may have defended your bachelor’s or master’s thesis, where you nervously responded to comments from equally nervous peers. Or you may have never had more than written feedback from a professor and a grade. Suddenly, all your work will be up for criticism, even in the earlier stages of work. Learning how to give and receive feedback is a skill that might not be explicitly taught. Rather, like a child learning to speak, you learn from repeated observations and mimicry. Giving criticism is highly culturally contingent, both to academic disciplines, departments, and the wider culture. 

It is important to realize that not all critique or feedback is something you need to take direct action on. Feedback often stems from a weakness in your arguments. The person giving you the feedback is misunderstanding, or not buying parts of your argument. This is especially true if you are getting feedback from someone who isn’t directly in the small niche that you are writing for.  This can be frustrating. You may think to yourself that the audience “just doesn’t get it”. But having your audience “get it” is your job. The feedback that you get is often indirect clues to how the audience is reading your text. If they misunderstand a concept that is central to your argument and research, that is a clue that you did not articulate that point enough. At this level, feedback isn’t like getting copyediting for a text, it is not as clear as “remove this, add this”.

At the same time, you should also define who your target audience is. Political Science is a broad discipline. When you write, have a person in mind. Pick someone from your department, or a researcher in your field, and write with them in mind. While some “not getting it” can be due to intra-disciplinary differences, if your target audience is “not getting it” it is a clue that you need to sharpen your arguments.  When getting verbal feedback, talk out your reasoning, and admit weaknesses and points of difficulty. This will create a discussion, and allow you to process your reasoning.

So, what are the best practices for giving critique? With your fellow PhD students, I think it is important to be generous in how you read their text and try to give feedback trying to keep in mind their target audience and their arguments. These can be more “basic” comments, is it clear what the paper is doing, does the structure of the text allow for readers to understand the reasoning, purpose, and execution of the research. It can be tempting to give more exploratory comments or suggest research extensions that are not particularly useful. I also don’t think it is particularly useful to hash out intra-disciplinary disagreements as part of paper-level critiques. If your comment boils down to “I don’t believe the fundamental core of this theoretical or methodological approach” skip the comment. There should be more venues to discuss these big questions, but I do not think it is useful when critiquing individual texts. Your goal is to help your fellow PhD students write stronger research.

Lastly, there is an emotional and ego aspect to both giving and receiving critique. When you receive critique, it can feel like your ideas are being attacked. It is normal to attach some level of self-identity to the ideas that you have thought of and argued for. On the other hand, giving critique can be motivated by a similar desire to show one’s academic ability. Keep both in check. To overcome the first one, it has been extremely useful for me to watch senior academics get sharp criticism of their work. It desensitizes you to criticism and reinforces that this is part of the work, rather than an evaluation of your ability. On the second point, when giving critique just make sure that your motivations are to help others make their research better rather than to demonstrate your competency by making “sharp” comments.

So, to sum up, recognize that research is an argumentative act. Take feedback seriously but realize that not every comment is a one-to-one revision. Realize that this can signal misunderstanding and that the person giving you feedback is interpreting what you have written.  While frustrating “they just don’t get it” means that your argumentation needs to be strengthened. Attend as many seminars as you can. Watch senior academics get critiqued. Normalize this as part of the process. When giving comments be constructive, and try to make comments within the logic of the subdiscipline that the author is writing in. Check your motivations, do not give comments to show your competency.