There was an interesting Facebook
conversation among a group of Nigerians last week on who, between medical
doctors and PhDs, are more deserving to be addressed as "Dr." I've
written about this before, so let me share my thoughts once again with people
for whom this sort of thing is interesting.
By convention, both
medical doctors and PhDs can prefix “Dr.” to their names. But, here, there's a
clash between etymology (origin and development of words) and pragmatics (how
words are actually used by speakers of a language).
The word “doctor” was historically
used for teachers because it’s derived from the Latin verb docēre, which means
“to teach.” So “doctor of philosophy” meant “teacher of philosophy,”
where “philosophy” meant what we now know as the sciences, the social sciences,
and the humanities, that is, disciplines other than law, medicine, and theology
which, as I showed two weeks ago, used to be called the "learned
professions."
To insist that words must
mean what they always meant from the beginning is called etymological fallacy.
Language doesn't work that way.
In contemporary uses,
people tend to first think of medical doctors before PhDs when the term
“doctor” is mentioned. For instance, when I visited Nigeria after completing my
PhD years ago, several of my mother’s friends came to ask that I give them
medicines for all sorts of illnesses. When they heard that I had become a
“doctor,” they assumed that I was a medical doctor.
I will never forget my
mother’s response to her friends. She said, “This doctor doesn’t treat
illnesses; he cures ignorance.” She said this even when she didn’t know that,
etymologically, “doctor” meant one who teaches, in other words, one who
cures ignorance, although I think it’s a bit arrogant to assume that anyone one
person, however knowledgeable, can cure all ignorance—or that you need a
doctorate to cure ignorance.
But the point is that
modern usage associates “Dr.” more with medical practitioners than it does with
PhDs.
That’s why the New York
Times style guide reserves “Dr.” only for medical doctors, and uses “Mr.” for
doctoral degree holders. If the doctoral degree holder’s qualification is
relevant to the story, the paper would write something like, “Mr. Smith, who
has a doctorate in physics, said…”
Other American newspapers
suffix “PhD” to the names of doctoral degree holders in news reports, as in,
“John Smith, Ph.D., said it was unwise to let that happen.”
© Farooq Kperogi
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