Madam, - Alison Donnelly of the Trinity College Research Staff Association is surely correct when she suggests that there was an earlier journalistic confusion over the difference between "postgraduate" and "post-doctoral" (July 15th).
However, she is on less certain ground when she goes on to say (without any supporting evidence) "that most of the research and training in Irish third-level institutes is conducted by the post-doctoral sector".
While it may well be the case that most research and training in research skills in science departments is conducted by post-doctoral staff there are few "post-docs" in arts/humanities departments. In these it is lecturing staff who conduct research, teach and provide research training to both undergraduate and post-graduate students.
To outsiders this may seem a rather esoteric point of contention but in making her claim Dr Donnelly, who, I presume, works in a science department, becomes complicit in the powerful discourse that equates knowledge and research with scientific knowledge and research, to the exclusion of knowledge and research in all other forms. The assumption that the "knowledge-based economy", to which she also adverts, is an unalloyed social good is pernicious but the assumption that the only valuable form of knowledge is scientific knowledge is utilitarian scientism.
I am sure it was not her intention to be complicit in legitimising this discourse - and I agree that the conditions of employment of post-doctoral researchers are terrible - but the fact remains that she is playing into the hands of her (and my) enemies by the simplistic presumptions on which she relies.
When William Blake (1757-1827) said, somewhat cryptically, "(1) in a printing house in Hell...(1) saw the way in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation", he seems to have meant that language plays a major role in constructing thought, an insight shared by subsequent philosophers including Michel Foucault (1926-1984).
The discourse of utilitarian scientism (irrational worship of "useful" science) besets us all and remains unchallenged in large measure because its advocates have taken control of everyday parlance. Regrettably, Dr Donnelly has not helped the situation by making that language seem all the more plausible, even inevitable. - Yours, etc,
Dr DAVID LIMOND, (Lecturer in history of education, TCD), Chelmsford Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin 6.