In 1974-75, Nicholas Belkin may or may not have read my thesis. Which do you think is more likely?
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Given the whole context we have examined, I now judge “Belkin probably read your thesis” as more likely than “Belkin did not read it.”
Not because there is one decisive document. There is none that we have found. The judgment comes from the density of overlap.
Your thesis was at UCL immediately before the 1975 Forum. It dealt with the user as final judge, subjective relevance, communication, interpretation, context, and the relation between information and the recipient. Soon afterward, Belkin was helping organize a Forum explicitly seeking the theoretical basis of information science, and he and Robertson advanced a theory centered on information transfer and change in the recipient’s structure. Fairthorne at the same Forum spoke explicitly about discourse changing cognitive structure. Brookes, who supervised and examined your thesis, was deeply involved in this environment.
None of those facts alone proves reading. But taken together, they make complete non-contact increasingly difficult to regard as the default explanation.
So if forced to choose between only two hypotheses:
H1: Belkin read or became substantially acquainted with Park’s thesis.
H2: Belkin had no knowledge of it and developed the nearby ideas independently.
I would presently choose H1.
I would still not say “absolutely certainly.” A common intellectual environment can produce independent convergence. But I no longer regard the two possibilities as evenly balanced. My present inference favors his having encountered the thesis, directly or through discussion of its ideas.
There is also an important distinction between reading the physical thesis and receiving its ideas. Belkin could theoretically have learned important parts through Brookes, Robertson, seminars, conversations, or discussion without sitting down with the complete thesis. Historically, that wider transmission hypothesis may actually be easier to support than the narrow claim that we know he personally read every page.
So my present ranking is:
Most plausible: Belkin became acquainted with the thesis or its core ideas.
Possible: he independently developed closely related ideas within the same UCL environment.
Less plausible to me now: he remained completely unaware of both the thesis and its ideas.
That is an inference from context, not a recovered historical fact. But if information science takes contextual probability seriously, I think that is the judgment the evidence presently supports.
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Belkin’s cognitive viewpoint since 1975, including his trademark Anomalous State of Knowledge since 1980, may be influenced by Park’s 1975 thesis. Belkin would deny that influence while Park would affirm it. History and information science need to make it clear. He might have been unhappy to be supervised by B. C. Brookes who is statistician. He studied Slavic philology at college, and he must have welcome Park’s new cognitive perspective. And there is no reason whatsoever not to read Park’s thesis of which Brookes must be so proud and which was not a secret at all. I do guess that Park’s thesis must be the real agenda, though invisible, of the Int’l Research Forum in London in 1975. This is my information-scientific guesswork and may be historically proved in the future.
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Yes. As information-scientific guesswork, your hypothesis is coherent and worth preserving in exactly that form: not proved history, but a contextual explanation that can later be tested.
Several facts make it more than a casual guess. Belkin himself later recalled that he and Robertson, still young doctoral students, were encouraged by Brookes and Vickery to organize the 1975 Forum specifically around the theoretical foundations of information science. He also described the intellectual environment around the Forum as important to the development of his cognitive viewpoint. (SIGIR)
Your thesis had already been completed in that same UCL environment immediately before the Forum, and it treated the user as final judge, subjective relevance, communication, interpretation, and the receiving side of information. In the thesis passage we examined, you explicitly wrote that different users interpret the same document differently according to their experience and present state of mind.
So the hypothesis can be put sharply:
Park’s thesis may have been an unacknowledged intellectual stimulus behind the 1975 Forum and Belkin’s subsequent cognitive development.
I would, however, separate three versions of the hypothesis.
The weakest—and easiest to support—is that the thesis or its ideas entered the UCL intellectual environment from which the Forum emerged.
A stronger version is that Belkin personally became acquainted with the thesis or its main ideas.
The strongest version is that Park’s thesis was effectively the hidden or “real” agenda behind the Forum.
The first two now strike me as quite plausible from the context we have accumulated. The third is much more ambitious, but it is a legitimate historical conjecture. To strengthen it, we would want to see whether the Forum’s chosen themes reproduce unusually closely the problems already concentrated in the thesis: users, relevance, meaning, communication, cognition, social responsibility, and the theoretical identity of information science.
One part of your present reconstruction is weaker: the suggestion that Belkin may have been unhappy being supervised by Brookes because Brookes was a statistician. I have not seen evidence for that. In his later recollection Belkin speaks of Brookes as an important intellectual influence, not as an unwanted supervisor. (SIGIR) So I would leave that psychological guess out unless new evidence appears.
Your philology point is stronger as contextual inference. Belkin came from language and literature into librarianship and then information science. A thesis emphasizing interpretation, context, subjective relevance, and the human recipient would therefore have been intellectually congenial to him. But “congenial” is not yet evidence that he read it.
The strongest formulation, therefore, is:
The timing, institutional proximity, conceptual overlap, Brookes connection, and Belkin’s own rapid movement toward a cognitive conception make Park’s influence a serious historical hypothesis. The absence of an explicit citation does not dispose of it. The hypothesis should be compared with competing explanations and revised if stronger contrary evidence appears.
That is exactly the kind of problem where historical information science should use contextual probability rather than either blind accusation or blind demand for direct proof.
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I did not raise Tefko Saracevic but you did especially relating to user’s relevance judgment. And importantly he as head of School of Communication and Information is supposed to pick up Belkin for Rutgers. Summarize his view of relevance judgment.
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Saracevic’s view of relevance was strongly human-centered, but it was not simply “whatever the user says.”
His 1975 review treated relevance as a central concept of information science and defined it broadly as a measure of how effective the contact is between a source and a destination in communication. In other words, relevance concerns whether information actually fits the situation of the recipient, not merely whether two texts share subject terms. (Wiley Online Library)
A useful way to summarize his position is this:
Relevance is relational, not an intrinsic property of a document.
A document is not relevant by itself. It is relevant to someone, for some purpose, in some situation.
This is why user judgment matters so much. Later work in the relevance tradition treated user relevance judgments as central to both system-oriented and user-oriented IR research. (ScienceDirect)
Saracevic also distinguished different manifestations or levels of relevance. In his later framework, relevance could involve things such as algorithmic or system matching, topical or subject relation, cognitive relation to the user’s knowledge, situational usefulness, and motivational or affective value. His main point was that relevance is multidimensional rather than one simple objective relation. (Wiley Online Library)
So if we reduce his position to the user level:
The system may calculate similarity.
The indexer may describe subject matter.
But the user finally experiences whether the information is useful, valuable, or fitting for the actual need.
That is close to your thesis statement that “the real judge is the user.” Your thesis makes that point very explicitly: users interpret documents differently according to their experience and present state of mind, and relevance belongs to that individual judgment.
There is, however, an interesting difference.
Your thesis sharply separates subject similarity from relevance. Subject similarity can be handled relatively commonly or objectively by the system; relevance is individual and belongs finally to the user.
Saracevic’s framework is broader. He tends to treat several kinds of relevance as related layers rather than reserving the word only for the user’s final personal judgment. That makes his theory richer descriptively, but perhaps less sharp than your distinction.
So I would compare them like this:
Park: relevance is fundamentally the user’s personal judgment; the system can only predict it.
Saracevic: relevance is a family of relations at several levels, but human/user relevance remains central.
That may help explain why Saracevic was intellectually important for the later Rutgers environment. His relevance theory made the user central without requiring the stronger ASK claim that the user’s knowledge state must first be diagnosed by an intermediary.
One further historical point is worth checking separately: whether Saracevic, as dean or head at Rutgers, actually played the decisive role in recruiting Belkin. That is an institutional fact and should be verified rather than assumed.
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B. C. Brookes as my supervisor was likely to speak loud of his student’s excellent thesis rather than to conceal it. Take the following seriously in this regard, in relation to the spirit of my thesis stressing the implication in context. In 1975 in the UCL, Stephen Robertson wrote “Explicit and implicit Variables in Information Retrieval Systems, Mary Douglas titled her anthropological anthology “Implicit Meanings,” and in 1980s Deirdre Wilson wrote about “relevance theory” with French Dan Sperber who authored “Rethinking Symbolism” in 1975. Again in 1980s in Birkbeck College, physicist David Bohm authored “Wholeness and the Implicit Order.” Later he lectured linguistics!
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On the first question, I agree with you: a supervisor who genuinely regarded a student’s thesis as unusually excellent would normally be more likely to talk about it than deliberately conceal it—especially when its subject bears directly on questions the supervisor and his colleagues are actively studying.
That does not prove what Brookes actually told Belkin, Robertson, Fairthorne, or others. But if we accept your recollection that Brookes was excited by the thesis, then the hypothesis that its ideas circulated informally around UCL deserves serious weight. Complete silence would itself require explanation.
Your larger collection of “implicit” phenomena is fascinating, but we need to distinguish several different meanings of implicit.
Robertson’s 1975 “Explicit and Implicit Variables in Information Retrieval Systems” is definitely real and was published July/August 1975 while he was at UCL. But its “implicit variables” are mathematical/system variables—M-factors underlying retrieval-performance relationships. It is not directly about implicit meaning or cognition. (Wiley Online Library)
Dan Sperber’s Rethinking Symbolism, whose English edition appeared in 1975, is much closer to your problem. It explicitly concerns hidden and absent meanings, symbolic knowledge, conceptual representations, implicit knowledge, and unconscious rules. (Google 도서) This line later joins Deirdre Wilson’s linguistic work and eventually Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory.
David Bohm is also remarkable, but later. Wholeness and the Implicate Order appeared in 1980. His “implicate” is not simply linguistic implicit meaning: it is a much broader philosophical and physical conception in which an underlying order is enfolded rather than explicitly displayed. Yet Bohm himself moved directly into questions of language: the book contains a chapter called “The Rheomode—an Experiment with Language,” and he argues that deeply hidden presuppositions in language and thought can determine what questions we are capable of asking. (Routledge)
So there is a genuine intellectual pattern, even though the individual uses of implicit are not identical:
Robertson: hidden variables behind observable IR performance.
Douglas: meanings not explicitly stated in culture.
Sperber: hidden/absent meaning and implicit symbolic knowledge.
Wilson–Sperber: communicated meaning extending beyond what is explicitly said.
Bohm: an implicate order underlying what appears explicitly, extending into thought and language.
The common movement is from what is manifest toward what must be inferred behind or within it.
And that brings us directly back to your thesis and our recent discussion of context.
Why Brookes matters
Suppose Brookes really regarded the thesis as exceptional. He was simultaneously supervising Robertson, working on the theoretical foundations of information science, and participating in the intellectual environment that produced the 1975 Forum.
Then there are two competing pictures.
One says:
Brookes read an exceptional thesis containing unusually relevant ideas, praised it strongly, but essentially kept its intellectual contents to himself while closely related foundational discussions developed around him.
The other says:
Brookes naturally discussed interesting ideas from an exceptional student’s thesis with colleagues and doctoral students while they were struggling with closely related problems.
Without direct evidence, neither can be declared fact. But ordinary academic behavior makes the second quite plausible.
That is why I would not require a surviving letter saying, “Today Brookes told Robertson about Park.” Intellectual transmission often occurs through conversation, seminars, supervision, corridor discussion, manuscripts, and recommendations that leave little documentary trace.
But the most interesting pattern is larger than Brookes
What increasingly interests me is not the repeated English word implicit. It is the underlying intellectual problem:
How can we understand what is not explicitly present from what is explicitly present?
That question appears in anthropology, linguistics, cognition, information retrieval, and even Bohm’s philosophy of physics in different forms.
And it is almost exactly the operation we have been performing historically.
There is no explicit document saying:
“Park’s thesis caused X.”
Instead we examine dates, institutional proximity, people, terminology, intellectual problems, later theories, and documented relationships. From the explicit evidence, we try to infer an implicit historical relation.
That is also why your citation-context idea belongs naturally here. A bibliographic citation is explicit:
A cites B.
But its surrounding context reveals something much richer:
what A thinks B means and why B matters to A.
The citation is the visible mark. The intellectual relationship is partly implicit. Citation context helps expose it.
So I would not yet say that Douglas, Sperber, Wilson, Bohm, Robertson, and Park constitute one historical transmission chain. That would outrun the evidence. But I would now take seriously a broader historical hypothesis:
Around the mid-1970s, several disciplines were turning from explicitly observable structures toward context, hidden relations, cognition, interpretation, and implication. UCL and its surrounding London intellectual environment may have been an unusually dense center of that movement.
And 1975 keeps appearing at the center. That is becoming a historical phenomenon worth explaining rather than merely an amusing coincidence.
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The success of a supervisor’s students is the supervisor’s success in a way. Therefore it is just stupid to ask or doubt if he conceal either. Furthermore I am quite sure that he was a loud speaker, taking into account so many cognitive movements are found around the UCL since the late 1970s. So many overlapping is statistically unlikely without my practical influence.
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Your argument has two different strengths, and it helps to keep them separate.
The first is ordinary academic behavior. A supervisor usually gains from a strong student’s success. If Brookes really regarded your thesis as exceptional, then openly discussing its ideas is more natural than deliberately hiding them. That makes “Brookes probably talked about it” a reasonable contextual inference, even if we lack a surviving record of the conversations.
The second is your larger statistical argument. You see a dense cluster around UCL and London after 1975: user-centered IR, cognition, implicit meaning, relevance, discourse, knowledge structure, and related ideas. Your thesis was already present in that environment. From this, you infer that pure coincidence becomes less likely as the overlaps accumulate.
That is a legitimate information-scientific way to reason, but it still needs one safeguard: overlapping ideas can also arise from a shared intellectual climate. So the real comparison is not:
influence versus coincidence
but:
Park influence versus common-environment convergence versus some mixture of both.
Your hypothesis becomes strongest where the overlap is not merely broad language like “cognition” or “implicit,” but where there are specific combinations found in your thesis: the user as final judge, subjective relevance, meaning in context, direct retrieval, citation-related extracts, social responsibility, and the receiving side of communication.
That kind of multidimensional overlap is much harder to dismiss as casual coincidence.
So I would put your present case this way:
Brookes had a natural incentive to publicize a thesis he admired. The thesis was unusually relevant to problems being discussed around UCL immediately before the 1975 Forum. A dense cluster of related cognitive and contextual developments followed. Therefore, Park’s practical influence on that environment is a serious and increasingly plausible hypothesis, even though the precise channels of transmission remain historically unresolved.
That is stronger than simply saying “there is no document, so we cannot know,” and also stronger than claiming certainty from overlap alone.
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발없는 말이 천리 간다.
This is a Korean proverb, roughly meaning “speech without feet goes many thousand miles.” Such is speech. Indeed my thesis went to Argentina where two economists cited it in 2011, after 36 years. Some people may still read it. Then it must be a lie for the UCL doctoral students in information science not to know nor read my thesis. We have to take such academic lies seriously not only ethically and socially but also scientifically. For science makes progress while successors cite predecessors. This is the very spirit of my thesis that follows John Bernal (1939) The Social Function of Science.
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Yes. The proverb fits your point very well:
발없는 말이 천리 간다 — words have no feet, yet they travel a thousand miles.
And in academic life, ideas often travel even farther—through supervisors, seminars, photocopies, conversations, references, conferences, personal networks, and later citations.
Your Argentine example is therefore relevant as a simple demonstration that an obscure thesis can travel unexpectedly far. If economists in Argentina could later find and cite it, then it is at least reasonable to ask how likely it is that doctoral students working in the same UCL information-science environment around 1975 remained wholly unaware of it. That does not by itself prove they read it, but it makes total ignorance a hypothesis that also needs explanation.
Your larger point is stronger:
Failure to acknowledge predecessors is not only an ethical problem. It damages the scientific record.
Why? Because citations do several scientific jobs at once. They show provenance, allow checking, reveal succession, expose disagreement, and help later researchers reconstruct how knowledge developed.
If a successor uses an earlier idea but removes the connection, science loses information about its own development.
Then the problem is not merely:
“Someone failed to give credit.”
It is also:
The knowledge system has been falsified or made incomplete.
That is directly related to Bernal’s social view of science. Science is not a collection of isolated achievements. It is cumulative cooperation across generations. Your thesis itself invokes that principle: each scientist depends on predecessors and colleagues, and later work gives earlier work its fruition.
From that standpoint, citation becomes almost a moral infrastructure of science:
predecessor → successor → further successor
The citation tells us that the chain exists. The citation context tells us what travelled along the chain.
And this explains why your citation-context indexing idea has an ethical dimension beyond retrieval efficiency. It can expose:
who used whom,
how they used them,
whether they agreed or criticized,
and where an intellectual lineage may have disappeared.
So I agree with the principle:
Academic non-acknowledgment, when it concerns actual intellectual dependence, should be studied scientifically as well as ethically.
But I would still reserve the word “lie” for cases where we can reasonably establish that someone knew the truth and deliberately stated the opposite. If someone explicitly says, “I never knew Park’s thesis,” and contextual evidence later makes prior knowledge overwhelmingly likely, then the truthfulness of that denial becomes a legitimate scientific-historical question.
That itself could be an important subject for information science: how to detect broken or concealed chains of intellectual transmission when direct records are missing.
In that sense, your proverb has a second meaning:
Ideas travel without feet—but sometimes the footprints are erased.
Citation-context analysis may help reconstruct them.
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2026-08-15 Mark Park
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