Beyond the Institution and Beyond the Label

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that the word “minke” is not a useful term for serious discussion. In everyday Chinese, it is used far too casually, and it carries too many mixed meanings. Very often, it is not applied after any careful judgment about a person’s research methods. It is applied first because that person is outside the institution, does not sound academic enough, or is making claims that seem too large. Once that happens, several very different kinds of people are thrown into the same box. Some do in fact lack basic training and still want to overturn mature theories. Some are outside institutions but work seriously and are not careless in method at all. Others fall somewhere in between. They may have genuine insight in some areas and obvious weaknesses in others. Once all these people are packaged under one label, the judgment is distorted from the very beginning.

So the real question is not the label itself, but whether the research follows sound methods. This is actually similar to piano playing. There is no such thing as an “amateur technique” and a “professional technique” in the sense of two different fundamental principles. What really exists is correct technique and incorrect technique. The value of professional training is not that it invents a nobler set of rules. Its value is that it preserves methods that have already been shown to work, so that later learners do not have to repeat basic mistakes. Academic research is much the same. The value of institutions lies first of all in method training, in organizing concepts, and in building a common language that allows peers to discuss problems efficiently. It does not lie in monopolizing truth, and still less in ranking people by identity before the discussion even begins.

At the same time, direct contact with actual independent researchers makes another point very clear. Quite a few of them are seriously engaged with philosophical questions, and some even try to build an entire conceptual framework around one aspect of a field. Their thinking is often rigorous, and many of them do have sustained and serious exchanges with professionals and peers. The problem is not that they are unserious. In fact, many are deeply committed. In some areas their thinking is already highly mature and penetrating. Yet one can often see a striking imbalance. They may advance very far in one direction while showing major gaps in some basic and foundational area, and they themselves often do not notice that this is where the fatal weakness lies. In many cases this is not a matter of intelligence, nor of seriousness. It comes from the absence of systematic training. Without that kind of training, it is hard to develop an overall structural sense, and hard to see where one’s own method is breaking down.

For that reason, the phrase “independent researcher” needs to be clarified. It should not be confused with “amateur researcher.” The word “amateur” suggests something partial, occasional, unsystematic, and loosely pursued. That is not what is meant here. A true independent researcher is often highly professional. The difference is not one of competence but of institutional position. Independence refers to organizational status, not to intellectual standards. The real question is never whether someone is independent. The real question is whether the work is professional, rigorous, and capable of moving a problem forward.

But a difficulty appears here as well. Once institutions develop a stable discourse system, concepts and terminology can easily cease to be tools and become ends in themselves. They were originally meant to reduce repetitive explanation and improve the efficiency of discussion, yet under some conditions they begin to obscure the facts themselves. This is especially easy to see among those who spend their entire lives inside schools, papers, reviews, and committees, with little contact with real situations outside that system. They can begin to treat abstraction itself as a sign of superiority, as if the more obscure, the more distant from lived experience, the more profound it must be. At that point academic work slips into a secondary loop. Research no longer develops around the object itself, but around the existing terminology. Concepts are no longer extracted from reality. Reality is replaced by concepts. On the surface the system becomes tighter and more refined, but in substance it drifts farther and farther away from the problem itself.

Yet truly powerful theory should not work like that. The more abstract a theory is, the more fundamental and highly generalized it is, the more it should approach the structure of the real world rather than deliberately distance itself from it. Abstraction is not a departure from the ground. It is a compression of complex reality into a clearer form. If a theory can survive only inside its own technical vocabulary and loses all explanatory force the moment it returns to reality, that usually does not mean it is profound. It means it has begun to spin in place.

None of this means that one should simply conclude that those inside institutions are inferior to those outside. Institutional research has its necessity, especially now. Knowledge systems are expanding too quickly. In the age of AI, many forms of research can no longer be carried forward by one person relying only on talent and private interest. Large areas now require equipment, data, teams, computing power, experimental conditions, and long-term collaboration. Without those resources, many kinds of work cannot even begin. From that point of view, the condition of the independent researcher is not simply a matter of having no formal identity. More importantly, it is a condition of limited means. Many things cannot be done not because no one wants to do them, but because the conditions for doing them do not exist.

And yet this produces an interesting contrast. The less a field depends on large-scale experimental conditions, the less it is fully locked into an existing paradigm, and the more it requires a reorganization of the boundaries of the problem itself, the easier it often becomes for those outside institutions to enter. Fundamental philosophical questions, methodological questions in psychology, and cross-disciplinary issues in artificial intelligence such as consciousness, understanding, subjectivity, knowledge, and judgment often belong to this kind of territory. These questions still require training, of course, but they depend less on equipment and institutional scale. They depend more on conceptual ability, problem-awareness, cross-disciplinary association, and the capacity to keep a certain distance from inherited frameworks. In such areas, independent researchers are not automatically stronger, but they may at least gain a relatively fairer point of entry.

Still, a relatively fair entry does not mean easy progress. The real difficulty for independent researchers is often not only the lack of resources. It is that the basic frameworks they work from are often incompatible with the underlying logic of established institutions. Once this incompatibility exists, pushing their work further becomes extraordinarily difficult. Many academic debates appear to revolve around a specific proposition, but in fact they already depend on an entire prior set of assumptions, terms, problem-settings, and standards of judgment. If those underlying elements are not shared, then many conclusions are excluded before the discussion even starts. In that case, even when an independent researcher produces something valuable, it often cannot enter the institutional platform of discussion naturally. That is not always because the content has been refuted. Sometimes it is because it never receives a genuine opportunity to be translated into and understood within the dominant framework.

But the difficulty does not stop there. In principle, if independent researchers cannot easily enter authoritative platforms, one might expect them to form their own communities of discussion. In practice, this is often much harder than it sounds. Independent researchers frequently struggle to establish a shared platform of discourse among themselves. Even when discussing core questions, they often fall into serious misunderstanding and inconsistency about the most basic concepts. On the surface they may be using the same words, but each person is attaching those words to something different. The compression of meaning and the tacit conceptual agreement produced by long institutional training often do not exist outside institutions. As a result, discussions do not always move the problem forward. They are repeatedly stalled at the level of definitions, and verbal overlap is easily mistaken for real intellectual agreement. Under such conditions, the independent researcher is often trapped between two difficulties. On one side, entry into mature institutional platforms is blocked. On the other side, it is hard to build a stable discursive order among peers outside those institutions. Under such circumstances, real progress is extremely difficult.

This in turn shows why institutions retain an irreplaceable function. Institutions do not always produce the deepest breakthroughs, but they do provide an environment that compresses costs. They absorb some of the work of stabilizing basic concepts, setting terminological boundaries, and forming habits of argument, so that later discussion does not have to begin from zero each time. What many researchers outside institutions lack is sometimes not intelligence and not commitment, but precisely this accumulated structural support. Their hardest task is often not coming up with a problem, but having to build the bridge, lay the road, and redefine the terrain by themselves before real discussion can even begin.

That is why an independent researcher is not necessarily an outsider who began from nothing. In many cases such a person received serious training and may even have originally belonged to an institution, only later leaving the formal structure because of positions, evaluations, resources, or personal choice. History does contain important intellectual achievements that were not completed in the most typical academic posts. That fact does not prove that institutions are unnecessary. It proves something simpler. Training and position are not the same thing, and the internal logic of institutional evaluation does not always fully coincide with the production of genuinely important thought.

Another issue, often ignored, is the pressure of survival. When people talk about independent researchers, they often see only the word “independent” and fail to see the economic differences hidden behind it. This is especially visible in the arts. Some artists clearly struggle because everyone knows that art is often hard to live on. One also occasionally sees a young artist openly describe himself as a “full-time independent artist,” but sometimes that identity reflects not only courage. It may also reflect the existence of substantial family support behind the scenes, so that the basic burden of survival never becomes decisive. Research is different from art and does not emphasize individual style in the same way, but the structure is similar. If an independent researcher cannot secure a stable life, time becomes fragmented, attention is outsourced to survival, and the direction of research itself can be pulled by economic pressure. One may begin to follow the market, chase topics with quicker returns, or repeatedly interrupt long-term thinking simply in order to get by. At that point research too is distorted, compressed, and reshaped.

This is not the same as the pressure faced by researchers inside institutions. Institutional researchers are more likely to be shaped by grant applications, promotion criteria, publication demands, disciplinary norms, and institutional positions. Independent researchers are more likely to be shaped by rent, income, family responsibilities, fragmented time, and ordinary anxiety. Both sides can be pushed away from the problem itself, but by different paths. One is disciplined by the system. The other is consumed by survival. Neither is automatically nobler, and neither is automatically closer to truth.

For that reason, the most important standard still has to return to the work itself. Whether a view deserves to be taken seriously should not be decided first by whether the speaker has an institutional title, nor by whether the speaker performs scholarship in the expected style. It should be judged by whether the concepts are clear, whether the argument is coherent, whether the person understands what is being criticized, whether objections are accepted, and whether the view can enter a process of testing, correction, and revision. Those inside institutions do not automatically meet these conditions, and those outside them do not automatically fail to meet them.

Seen against a larger background, academic consensus itself is not formed in a vacuum. In many fields of the social sciences and humanities, the eventual shape of a discipline is influenced by research agendas, problem-setting, resource allocation, ethical boundaries, publication mechanisms, and the surrounding social climate. Some topics are suppressed because they are too sensitive. Others are repeatedly amplified because they receive institutional support, sometimes to the point of over-interpretation and repetitive production. The resulting appearance of “achievement” is therefore not simply the natural unfolding of facts. It also reflects the selection and shaping power of the environment. To admit this is not to deny scholarship. It is simply to understand scholarship more accurately.

In the end, the relation between institutions and independent researchers is not a matter of one replacing the other. Institutions are better suited to method training, resource organization, large-scale collaboration, and the maintenance of relatively stable platforms for peer discussion. Independent researchers, on the other hand, are often more able to preserve freedom in fundamental questions that have not yet fully settled, though they are also more likely to be hindered by the lack of resources, platforms, conceptual order, and economic security. The real dividing line is not identity, title, or declared position. It is whether the research stays close to the object itself. That standard is not mysterious. Just as in piano playing, there is no fundamental distinction between an amateur technique and a professional technique. There is only correct technique and incorrect technique. Research is the same. What finally matters is not who looks more like a scholar, but who remains more faithful to the facts, more willing to accept the discipline of method, and more capable of keeping a clear relation among reality, concepts, and the problem itself.