PhD: what is it?

PhD stands for doctoral of philosophy or philosophy doctorate

there are two important issues in this concept: 1) philosophy and 2) doctoral study

• philosophy in PhD refers to the approach undertaken by the researcher to produce a scientifically rigorous and reliable piece of scholarship. it hence is all about the methods of thinking, reasoning, analysis and interpretation. a PhD project must follow a set of well-established standards, procedures and review to be accredited as a scientifically valid work and this is reflected in the philosophical part of the concept. it is not common to talk philosophically in your PhD but at least any PhD student is recommended to have a safe and sound background knowledge of the philosophy of science. it may include but not limited to issues regarding positivism, modernism, realism, determinism, interventionism, interpretivism, and reaoning logics such as inductive, deductive, abductive and also views about theory, that embraces issues such as  what theory is and is not, theoretical view, theory development, theory testing and extension, etc. there are numerous books about this issue , if you simply search Google or Amazon you will find hundreds of books about basics and foundation of philosophy of science.  In this blog i attempt to cover basics and principles of these issues 
• doctoral or doctorate refer to the depth and breadth of a study situated within a well-positioned side of literature. it means that a doctoral study must be narrow, specific and value-contributing. this is sort of tricky and confusing. a doctoral study must address a specific aspect or dimension of literature or real world. it can address a gap, controversy, deficiency, shortcoming or problem in literature or address a problem in real world providing it is based on some theoretical views. More precisely,  theoretical views are linchpins of a doctoral study.  a doctoral study no matter what subject or area is , is established based on some theoretical views more than one, usually with one pre-dominant view . they ae pivots around which gap or problem are justified , questions are framed and methods, analysis and interpretation build and develop. therefore a doctoral student must clearly define the theoretical boundaries of his work by specifically talk about the theoretical views employed in his work and to what extent they are relevant to is work .  this is a very broad topic, i content myself with this extent and am happy to asnwer questions posed on the blog or facebook page.

in the next post i talk about proposal, finding topic , gap or problem for a PhD