Dr. Jill Biden wants BOTH LSU and IOWA WBB to visit White House.

[Dill]

(04-09-2023, 11:38 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: I wonder sometimes about the titles used for this stuff. Like, okay, I can understand if you have a consistent argument for using Dr. for professional doctorates and not research doctorates. But if you use Dr. for a Ph.D. then you should for an Ed.D. as well. Then you have the weird thing where we call M.D.s Dr. but not J.D.s. Why is that? Is it just because we have such a disdain for J.D.s in society as a profession? And what about a D.N.P.? Should they be called Dr.? That could just get confusing.

This is largely a historical development in the U.S., Bels.

There were no Juris doctors granted in the 19th century, but lawyers everywhere. Juris Doctor was not commonly labeled such until the 1960s. So our ways of talking about lawyers were set before the degree.

Doctorates in physics, biology, languages, social science etc., only became a thing after the Civil War, as U.S. colleges shifted from a Latin-based 
curriculum to the German research model. But proportionally to the population, these were very few in number. The religious right began contesting their authority way back then, especially as the new universities began teaching Darwin and secular religious history. That contestation of legitimacy has extended to many other fields as well, including the social sciences and humanities--anything which could contest received religious views. 

In Europe, the title "doctor" was developed in the 1300s to apply to those who went beyond the masters in studying theology, law, medicine, and the liberal arts (meaning scholastic philosophy, not our contemporary humanities with literature and history) in Medieval universities, which were not research entities at all, and quite hostile to new knowledge. People who got doctorate degrees usually went on to teach their subjects in universities, as supposed to practicing their subjects outside. They were the masters of the masters, so to speak. The Ph.D.--requiring a dissertation*--developed in Germany during the late 18th century and fixed into most universities there by second decade of the 19th. That's where our current ideals of academic freedom and secular research were developed, in contrast with the dogmatic ethos of the Medieval university.

*i.e., a research based degree which created new knowledge, which usually evolved during a succession of "seminars," also a German innovation--a class where students participated in presenting and discussing each other's work. Medieval doctorates were not about any of that.