Research Like a Dog

🍏your Sunday read 16th March, 2025

A well-researched original piece to get you thinking.

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Image Credits: General Research Division, The New York Public Library. (1826 - 1828). 1. Newfoundland Dog; 2. Eskimaux Dog.

Hi Scholar,

For the first time, the Sunday Read has been co-written from start to finish by both The Critic and The Tatler. Rather than the usual process of writing, editing, and providing feedback, this piece is a true collaboration: equal in effort and thought. It has taken significant time to put together, but it has also been one of the most enjoyable Sunday Reads we’ve worked on.

Kafka’s work invites endless interpretations, but as two people who see the world through the lens of knowledge and research, we couldn’t help but read it as a scathing critique of knowledge itself. It made us reflect on how easily researchers fall into the trap of being dogmatic (excuse the pun) within their intellectual frameworks among many other questions.

That said, rather than offering a clear-cut lesson, Kafka’s story serves as a provocation - an invitation to challenge the ways we think about research. And that, after all, is precisely why we write the Sunday Read.

So grab a beverage and your reading glasses, let's get thinking.

Research Like a Dog

Written by The Critic & The Tatler

Can Franz Kafka’s ‘Researches of a Dog’ teach us anything about research and knowledge production?

The story, at its core - at least from our reading of it, is about the pursuit of truth - an investigation into the nature of the world, albeit from a dog’s perspective. It follows an elderly dog reflecting on his lifelong quest to answer the question: where does the food that dogs eat come from? His search for answers, however, is constrained by the scientific traditions and assumptions of dogdom.

Like any dedicated scholar, the elderly dog pursues his research with rigor. His investigation is shaped by the intellectual frameworks of his species and built upon a foundation of unquestioned dog science. As he explains:

Thanks to the efforts of dog scholars and centuries of observations, dog science has gone even further, developing a set of rules that, when followed, ensure all of dog society has enough to eat:

To sum up, dog science holds that:

1. Dogs should regularly scratch and water the earth.

2. Dogs may call forth food from the earth by performing certain rituals, including dancing and singing.

3. The earth is more likely to produce food at certain places or a certain time of day.

These "facts" are universally accepted by all dogs, including the protagonist, who is the central scientific character of this story. It makes perfect sense then for the elderly dog to pose the question:

At first glance, this seems like a solid question. But if we examine it a little closer, it is built on an assumption which is never questioned by the elderly dog - that the earth itself produces food. However, by starting with such an underlying assumption, the elderly dog’s inquiry itself becomes constrained. The question he poses only makes sense or ‘works’ in the very particular system of thought that has come to be accepted in broader dog science.

For if the earth did not produce the food, it would become impossible to pose the question ‘where does the earth get the food from?’. 

This is much like our own efforts to understand the world, which operate within certain inherited systems of thought. Our assumptions, perspectives, and intellectual frameworks not only shape but also limit the kinds of knowledge we produce and the kinds of questions we pose.

Drawing a parallel to our own individual efforts to do research, we - like the elderly dog - often skip over questioning the foundational assumptions of our fields and get straight to asking questions. We exist within paradigms - what Thomas Kuhn has described as a "set of common beliefs and agreements shared between scientists about how problems should be understood and addressed." Just as the dogs take for granted that food comes from the earth, we take for granted the intellectual paradigms that structure our knowledge.

The Limits of Knowledge: What We Cannot See

Returning to the story, the elderly dog tells us that no one he ever asks is willing to engage with his question, despite some rather obvious inconsistencies between what science teaches and what dogs actually do in practice to get food:

That dogs should direct their eyes to the sky (instead of to the earth, as science tells them to) when performing food-summoning ceremonies is an inconsistency with the structure of thought governing dogs' understanding of how to get food. Ultimately, the fatal flaw, in the dogs' worldview, as you may have guessed, is that the earth does not produce the food. 

Dogs cannot ‘see’ human beings, who are actually the source of the food they eat.

When developing their framework, dog scholars did not entertain the possibility of humans, nor did they even pose questions about their existence—because why should they? Food comes from the earth. Their entire structure of thought makes the idea of humans unnecessary; dogs are unable to ask certain questions because conceptual frameworks make those questions invisible. As a result, their research is not only constrained by unquestioned assumptions but also by their perceptual limits. 

In the end, despite being able to perceive small inconsistencies between his own observations and accepted knowledge, the elderly dog has spent his whole life unable to answer his question:

The elderly dog is a diligent researcher and comprehensively records the details of his investigations and experiments, but nevertheless humans remain beyond the limits of his cognitive boundaries and subjective perceptions.

Can you see the metaphor taking shape? Our scientific frameworks are built within the boundaries of what we can observe and conceptualize. Human beings, with their own intellectual, cognitive, perceptual limitations, are similarly restricted in their search for absolute truth - though we may not like to acknowledge it. Absolute truth, in the traditional sense of something that exists independent of human interpretation or perception, seems unreachable because every being (whether human or dog) can only comprehend truth within the limits of its perception and experience. But then this begets the question:

Does Absolute Truth Matter?

In our research, we tend to believe that with careful planning, rigorous methodology, advanced technology, and—to be frank—our own human brilliance, we can fully know the unknown; that if we look hard enough, we can see all things that we seek to. However, our own human efforts at research are also constrained by our observational and experiential limitations. We are inevitably limited by our own subjective lenses when trying to understand objective reality.

Much like the elderly dog, we face a certain challenge - perhaps even an impossibility - in accessing absolute truth.

The point of all this is not to say, "Oh well, there will surely be some things we cannot see or comprehend, so let’s just forget about rigor and knowledge and start scratching the earth to produce our food." Rather, it’s an opportunity to reflect on our own relationship to knowledge as people who have taken it upon themselves to produce it.

While we may never attain an absolute and final truth, that does not render our research meaningless. On the contrary, research is not about finality, but about continual refinement: about getting closer, even if we never arrive.

Does it actually matter if we can’t develop a knowledge of absolute truths? To put it another way: is the dog's understanding of where food comes from really so bad? After all, they have a set of laws that have been developed based on the data they gathered during their research.

These laws are replicable and reliable and, ultimately, they serve their purpose: dogs can feed themselves. So, is it really problematic?

Yes, dogs may not perceive absolute truths about their world, but dog science still works. It works because they are still able to arrive at approximations of the truth, and there is enough correspondence to their reality.

This is much like how research works for us humans. We might not ever be able to access absolute truth, but approximations are still possible. Einstein's Theory of Relativity is a perfect example: it’s known to be a great approximation and does a good job at explaining space and time, but it’s not perfect. Similarly, psychologist Donald Hebb has been quoted as saying, “A good theory is one that holds together long enough to get you to a better theory.”

Our research works within our frameworks, and when it doesn’t we develop better frameworks; that is something to celebrate. There is no need to lament our inability to arrive at absolute truths. Our knowledge might be incomplete and fragile, subject to change and revision instead of finality and absoluteness, but the point is that it still has pragmatic value:

it works for us.

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