Where National Prioritization Matters in Research

Quality Demands Priority

India’s poor quality research has been an accusation so entrenched during recent years that academics largely hesitate to defend their pursuits. Seldom do they question measures of quality as if they are universal. Actually, there is no universally accepted definition of quality research. Philosophy points to certain ways, means, measures and parameters of quality knowledge production. What is to be researched or what priorities are to be set did differ from period to period under the pressure of the changing material conditions of human existence and as enabled by the given socio-political matrix (Marx, 1844). Discoveries and inventions depended on necessity and chance (Monod, 1971). In differentiated societies, necessity meant class necessity, and chance depended on the probability under the social matrix. Today, the control is entirely by the dominant economy called corporate capitalism, also called techno-capitalism due to its heavy dependence on technology. It is popularly known as knowledge economy.

Quality knowledge has always been deep and theoretical. The practical wisdom sustained by ethnic groups, generally without any rationale or proof except the result, has depth and embedded theory too, though it has often been under destruction in the wake of the rise of science. Deeper knowledge is scientific, exposing the shallowness of the surface information and invariably exciting critical consciousness. Hence, it is inherently subversive, too. Quality research is, therefore, the one that leads to the production of deeper knowledge of criticality, ideally with the potential of social development. This epistemologically and ethically valid quality must be central to national priorities. But, it is easier desired than realized, for the techno-capitalist corporate power determines national priorities.

Techno-capitalist Corporate Interests

Techno-capitalism, heavily depended on technology, invests on production, consumption and exchange of marketable new knowledge (MNK), the most highly priced commodity with Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and patents, as a new means of accumulation (Feenberg, 1991; Perelman, 2004; Suarez-Villa, 2009, 2012). Heavily depended on technology, it constrains science to merge with technology and scientists to transform their discoveries into inventions. This turns scientific knowledge into multiple commodities of enormous reinvestment potential.

Capitalists evolving a new form of industrial organization called the corporate have opened up huge research establishments in sectors such as genomics, synthetic bioengineering, bioinformatics, agro-biotechnology, bio-pharmacology, grapheme engineering, robotics, cloud computing, nano-tech sensors and transmitters to generate MNK to gain IPR and patents, the products of creativity known as intangible assets of enormous reinvestment potential, which make innovative knowledge both commodity and capital (Suarez-Villa, 2012). Trading in intangible assets corporate houses accumulate four-fifth of the total global returns today. Quality research according to techno-capitalist corporate establishments is the one that results in the production of MNK.

Techno-capitalist corporate houses have erected globally a juridico-political system of IPR and patent rules, enabling confiscation of creativity (Perelman, 2004). Naturally, creativity or innovativeness is the catchword of quality research today. Under constraints of knowledge economy, the promotion of researches addressing corporate interests has become integral to the national development strategy. Integrated cross-disciplinary research, transcending the limitations of discipline-based approach that is conventional, tacit and linear in perspective, has been gaining precedence at the national level. This is in alignment with the corporate preference of science-tech hybrid areas of hugely expensive instrumentation-based knowledge production, which preclude disciplinary boundaries. Such instrumentation-intensive research helps trade in instrumentation.

We cannot ignore the truth that knowledge areas are increasingly drawing closer to one another enabling convergence or holistic integration of different disciplines. Researchers are expected to gain adaptability to cross-disciplinary academic exchange. Nevertheless, lost in disciplinary silos, most researchers fail to communicate with fellow researchers in other disciplines. It is extremely important for them to get out of the predicament of cross-disciplinary illiteracy. Similarly, it is increasingly felt that the researcher gets distanced from social goals in the process of the routine kind of mechanical research.

Regional/Local Priorities

Regional/local-level priorities addressing people’s needs will be normally sidelined in the wake of the dominance of national priorities determined by corporate interests. It is a fact that only those proficient in mathematical computational skill, high power computing, micro-engineering technology and advanced instrumentation can undertake research in such fields of national priority. If all researchers are asked to work in science-tech and related fields, how do good brains become available for inventing solutions to regional/local problems?

Some of the local problems are critical, too. Many regions face drinking water crisis, impairment of water quality, problems of draught, flood and salinity intrusion, non-degradable waste accumulation, communicable diseases, agro-biodiversity depletion, etc., to mention only a few. Some of the priority areas are common, too. For example, the shift of priority from technology/energy-intensive development to sustainable development is equally important for the centre as well as states.

Quality First

Ideally, any research is supposed to be leading to production of new knowledge, although it seldom does so. Hence, quality should be a national priority in research. It should be made mandatory that researchers proceed with genuine research questions addressed to problems and their research should lead to the discovery of what underlie their problems. Researchers should learn to interpret or explain their discoveries, which constitute the new knowledge they produce. They should know the ways of integration of their discoveries into theory and communicate it orally as well as in writing.

Institutional insistence of specific outcome is necessary to ensure quality in research, when people without curiosity are constrained to enrol themselves to do research. Then, there must be central stipulations for quality assurance through outcome-based research. As part of the course outcome of the PhD programme, the researchers must be capable of demonstrating up-to-date knowledge base in the discipline concerned. They must understand foundational aspects of the research methodology and should be able to apply methodology and advanced theoretical knowledge to resolve their research questions. Researchers must be able to demonstrate critical thinking and creativity in the process of their research. They should be able to show proficiency in communicating the results of their research.

A researcher should know that research is a rigorous and systematic activity based on a set of methodological procedures and techniques of investigation on a select phenomenon to produce new knowledge over there, which is capable of improving upon preexisting knowledge. It demands a good knowledge base in the scholarly area of the topic of research, good communicative skill in the technical language of the subject, high-level analytical faculty, faculty to reflexive thinking and great logical precision to argue the proposition without missing the link between the premises and conclusions. On top of all these, researchers should possess critical social perspective in knowledge production, which makes them conscious of reality around.

In order to enable researchers to successfully do all these, they should graduate in methodology, the science of method that denotes the way of knowing, seeing, thinking and doing. Methodology initiates in the ways and means of drawing inferences and provides the logical preliminaries necessary to establish the validity of inferences and recognize their nature in terms of levels of knowledge. It helps a researcher to understand philosophical categories like heuristics, hermeneutics, ontology and epistemology (Tennis, 2008). Researchers should be clear about levels and forms of the being of knowledge differentiated as ontology and distinguished epistemologically. Epistemology is the science of ontological analysis for distinguishing the knowledge of reliability. The highest level and form of new knowledge is theory. All this goes to equip the researcher to be sure about the reliability of the knowledge produced through research.

Philosophy of Science

Researchers in science have to inevitably follow scientific methodology. At the same time, they should understand logical fundamentals related to knowledge production. As a part of this, they must have knowledge in the history and philosophy of science, which deal with the making of the basis, structure and constitution of science as the relatively efficient, open and transparent process of production of reliable knowledge about the mysterious universe. It is important that the researcher has at least a tenuous idea about the non-European and European roots of science. Researchers should understand as to how the classical Greek and Hellenic knowledge through the West Asian Arabs and the Indic mathematical astronomers, particularly Kerala, enabled the Renaissance Natural Philosophy of Copernicus, Galileo and Isaac Newton. They should know in detail the history of science as a nineteenth-century construct at the instance of Newton’s Principia Mathematica (Gurukkal, 2019). They have to understand how the huge edifice of physics of certainty and absolute induction grew up from the Newtonian fundamental laws of macro-mechanics and subsequently transformed itself into a field of uncertainty through the theories of Einstein, Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, Godel, Feynman, Gell-Mann and others into physics of uncertainty.

Philosophers of science have dealt with foundations, methodology and implications of science, providing insights into the features, relations, dynamic and limitations of scientific inquiry, experiments, proofs and confirmation (Popper, 1959, 1972). In the process of learning philosophy of science, researchers familiarize themselves with debates on induction, deduction, subjectivity, objectivity, empiricism, scepticism, theory and truth (Lakatos, 1976, 1980). They understand properties and distinction of science and the common underlying cognitive thread across all science disciplines. It is important that they learn Thomas Kuhn’s theory of Normal Science (Kuhn, 1962) and Imre Lakatos’ ‘protective belt’ in methodology (Lakatos, 1980).

Theoretical Approach

Theoretical approach is not a matter of choice for research, be it in science, technology, social science or humanities. Research is inherently a theoretical project. It is the explanatory mission that takes research to the production of new knowledge. In the case of material science, it is arriving at an all-inclusive abstraction stated in the language of mathematical equations. For most other areas that can be called human sciences, a serious explanatory exercise is invariably social theoretical (Flyvbjerg, 2001; Turner, 1997). Social theory is the aggregate of explanatory frameworks about the homologous linkages amongst the major instances such as economy, technology, polity, jurisprudence, ethics, religion and culture. They establish correlation at the micro aspects of instances such as power relations, ideology, institutions of control, structures of domination, practices, rites, rituals, subject positions, dynamic of transformation and the multiple processes thereof.

The central epistemological premise of social theory is that it maintains cognitive insistence up on the difference between appearances and underlying reality. Phenomenological understanding and social theorization of underlying principles do not converge and contest each other. Social sciences represent a form of knowledge noted for its hermeneutic strength based on social theory. Researchers should know how Newtonian physics of certainty through the ages of enlightenment, reason, and science laid the foundation of methodological modernity of social sciences; and how the new physics of uncertainty demolished it. It is significant that the researchers comprehend the postmodern hermeneutic turns and epistemological shifts thereof.

Epistemic Positioning

Whether you wish it or not, there exists no option for any researcher today to be out of the modern–postmodern debate. Every researcher has to acquire at least a tenuous understanding of the meaning and implications of the modern and the postmodern. It is almost indispensable for her/him to gain some competency in epistemological positioning of oneself, which means positioning of oneself in the context of the science of knowledge as debated between the modern and the postmodern.

Many researchers are not aware that knowledge production in modernity was guided by a fundamental concern about order. Creating order out of chaos through objective rationalization was the aim of knowledge production. The assumption was that rationalization would lead to the production of objective knowledge capable of cognitively turning chaos into order. Another related assumption was that the more ordered a society is, the better rational its functions are. Since modernity was about the pursuit of ever-increasing levels of order, modern societies constantly were on guard against anything and everything labelled as disorder. It is essential that researchers are aware of the modern societies’ obsession with the binary opposition between order and disorder and the presumption that order has precedence over disorder.

Researchers should know that in modernity, language or the mode of expression used in disseminating knowledge was believed to be rational, transparent, truthful and capable of objective representation of reality of the world, exactly as the rational self-construes. It is very significant for them to realize that according to linguists of modernity, the language was taken to be an open system of literary usages, expressions and words of definite and context-free rules of semantics, enabling true translation of thoughts. Researchers should be able to recognize how such presumptions lost their foundation in the wake of the ascendancy of the postmodern thoughts exposing the limitations of modernity. It is extremely relevant for the researchers in all non-science fields to understand that knowledge actually follows the paradigm of a language game (Lyotard, 1979; Wittgenstein, 1969). They have to realize that they can imagine only what they can symbolize; they can speak of only what the language enables, that is, the way how the working of the ‘master tropes’ of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony enable; and they speak only in the ways the rules of discourse allow. In short, it must be clear to them that knowledge production takes place in a world of language, discourse and ideology, none of which are transparent, while all of them structure the sense of being and belonging (Derrida, 1967; Foucault, 1972).

Researchers must be aware that postmodern thought formation is homologous to the epistemology of new physics that precludes logo-centrism, linearity, stability, finality, certainty, objectivity, context-free laws of universality and grand theorization. They should be able to explain why constructivists, for whom the act of knowing is the result of experience-based activities, oppose the dogma of objective truth. It is crucial for them to realize that knowledge gets constructed through acts of cognition, such as representation, imagination, understanding, intuition and so on. Researchers must familiarize themselves with the thoughts of constructivists like G. Bateson, H. Simon, von Foerster, von Glasersfeld and Rorty, J. Piaget, E. Morin, P. Valery, Le Moigne and others. They must know that the claim of objectivity even in the case of scientific observation is baseless, because there can be no observation without the observer.

As part of methodology, every researcher must be initiated in Hermeneutics that turned philosophical since Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1833) and theoretical since Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833–1911). It became ontological since Martin Heidegger (the essentialist theory of knowledge) and since his student Hans-George Gadamer. Now, hermeneutics is an interrogation into the deepest textual conditions to know symbolic interactions in culture, providing the critical horizon of contemporary philosophy. Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), Karl-Otto Apel (1922–), Jurgen Habermas (1929–), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Richard Rorty (1931–2007) and John McDowell (1942–) are the famous theoreticians in it. Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation for researchers seeking to explain the foundational aspects of interpretation. Heuristics and Hermeneutics manifest themselves as a single continuum in research practice.

Critical Consciousness

Criticality and creativity are the obverse and reverse of the same coin. Every researcher must develop critical consciousness, for it is indispensable for the production of new knowledge. Critical consciousness triggers rigorous research and production of strikingly new knowledge distinct for intellectual depth. Critical consciousness is essential for the transformation of researchers into good citizens capable of public policy debates and collective operations seeking social transformation. Critically accessed deeper knowledge unveils the unethical dimensions in human affairs and social processes. Deeper knowledge produced across disciplines is innately linked to questions of social equity and environmental sustainability. Hence, a researcher of shallow knowledge base is unethical, too, though inadvertently. Researchers, irrespective of the knowledge area they specialize in, should listen to scientists, social scientists, linguists, artists, literary critics and creative writers, who voice against the dehumanizing and anti-environmental aspects of the global economy. Critical consciousness begets creative minds.