The changing nature of doctoral education over the past three decades has taken on a triadic relationship constructed around expectations-process-purposes and has generated much commentary and critique. The intention of this paper is to focus on the notion of "purpose" from the perspective of doctoral supervisors which we have collated into four themes labelled "knowledge generation," "recognition," "positionality" and "instrumentalism". The themes were generated via the analysis of semi-structured interviews undertaken with 50 doctoral supervisors as part of the SuperProfDoc project investigating their practice.