What are the true professions?

The discussion concerning the JD and use of the title "doctor" got me to thinking about status and recognition. From my understanding, law, medicine and theology are the only true professional endeavors. Of course, we in modern society tend to think of the term "profession" as a much broader concept. What does everyone think about it? Must you have a college degree to be a professional? Is a profession only a white-collar job? Or, are you a traditionalist and go with the original definition? I'm just looking for some random discussion on this.

 

That is a good question. I thought about and I would have to say that a college degree is not need to be called a professional. I would call a 20 year homicide detective a professional and most police department still have no college requirements.

 

Definitions vary, but professions typically have:

-- A defined set of practices
-- Education and/or training requirements for entry
-- Some type of measurement for entry (like an examination)
-- A process for advancing its practices
-- A set of ethics/rules/etc.
-- A controlling or defining body (like AMA, ABA, etc.)

YMMV, of course.

 

In the USA you can become a professional engineer based on testing and experience. To approve certain projects you must be a professional engineer.
In the UK the equivalent is Chartered Engineer.

 

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Oh boy. I'll be in the corner eating popcorn.

 

No, of course not. The world's oldest profession doesn't require a degree at all and is very lucrative. You might want to look into it. Although, I heard Duke might be starting such a degree program. good luck.

 

I wonder what the entrance requirements are!

 

From webster:
Profession - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary

4 a : a calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive academic preparation b : a principal calling, vocation, or employment c : the whole body of persons engaged in a calling

 

IMO, I think those sectors (law, medicine, theology) are more thought of as terminal degrees in that you don't need a PhD to be called Doctor or necessarily further education to excell in it. You also *need* those degrees to even practice your trade, as opposed to just picking up a CCNA book, pass the exam and submit a resume. Of course, some JDs/MDs/MTh go on to receive a doctorate but it's rare. The rest of us rely on many years of work and study to progress in our *professions*.
As Rich said, all of them eventually fall under the aegis of some governing body. In certain countries in the past, an informal guild was governing ethics, rules and arbitrating the disputes. Now, there are professional bodies and boards that specify rules for governance and standards.

 

In these 'true doctorate' and 'true profession' questions, there seems to be an implicit assumption hidden in the questions that true doctorates and true professions already have been clearly and authoritatively defined somewhere, even if we aren't sure by whom, and that we just need to learn how the categories are correctly applied.

My own idea is that these kind of questions are ultimately unanswerable, and are productive of endless argument, because they ask for something that doesn't really exist.

No secret powers exist anywhere defining the meaning and extension of words in a way that's authoritative for all language users. Dictionaries contain definitions, but these entries are descriptive, not prescriptive. They attempt to capture common word usage at a particular point in time. (The beauty of the Oxford English Dictionary is that it shows us how those usages have changed over the centuries.)

So my belief is that when the Degreeinfo hounds go barking off after what "real" doctorates are or aren't, and when they start baying after how the "real" professions are officially defined, they are pursuing definition and clarity that simply don't exist in real life.

Nobody has ever determined those things. Nobody is in a position where they could have done so in a way that would be authoritative for everyone else. All we have are words in the English language and their traditional and more recent usages which have probably never been defined with the kind of precision that we are seeking.

In the case of 'professions', the word seems to have originally referred to the upper-tradesmen of the medieval bourgeoisie with a class-status that got them entry into aristocratic circles and some respect once there. The higher sorts of physicians, clergymen and lawyers were the earliest ones, I think. But I don't think that it was ever a precisely defined group and its exact composition probably varied considerably from place to place, time to time, and situation to situation. When war threatened, a king doubtless was eager to talk to designers of siege engines and especially to experts familiar with those newfangled fire-belching cannons that were knocking down castle walls.