In its quest for legitimacy, the traditional view in public administration distinctly attempts to associate reason with judgment. The desire for rational, technical decision-making has become a powerful organizing principle in public administration. While this model has dominated the discussions and debates in the scholarly work, there are some who also argue that legitimacy of the state itself is not public administration’s problem (Miller, 2004a). Miller’s position takes place under a working thesis that public administration would work better if we upgraded pragmatism. While American pragmatism of the 1920s to 1950s has been neglected by many subsequent scholars, and is often misunderstood, pragmatism is recognized as an analytical philosophy
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20), is an attempt to get us to stop thinking of language as a medium. Miller clarifies that point by explaining that participants of a situation regarding discourse are historically informed actors, that the background of the subject and customs in the community in which a situation is problematized are also important. Cotkin (1995) disagrees, instead he reasons that in James’s view, the individual and the social are the arena for reconstruction, not the linguistic revisions that exist without constraints of historical, social, class, race, and gender that Rorty suggests. Cotkin defends that “James would tell Rorty to make choices in the public sphere and to approach them with passion” (p. …show more content…
217) with wide application to many public administration contexts, I accept Miller’s postmodern criticism that Shields’s pragmatism becomes “a vulgar instrument”. Shields counters that postmodernists wrongfully conflate pragmatism with positivist philosophies, pointing out that pragmatists believe there is an “external reality”; meaning is constructed without dismissing the external environment. Miller’s critique of Shields goes beyond its fervent faith in science, to a problem he locates in her ignoring the works of Rorty by insisting on a particular interpretation of Dewey’s work. To understand the significance of this lapse, we first have to understand that pragmatism was not dramatically affected by the scientific paradigm shift after Kuhn because it was already “oriented towards the problematic situation rather than generalized, universal truth (Miller, 2004a, p. 244). According to Miller (2004b), “what is needed is improvement in the methods and conditions of discourse” (p. 182), thus in pragmatic, postmodern research, “legitimation comes from these local communities, from their own discourses”, whose local inquiries attempt “to figure our which construction of reality works better given the contingencies of local contexts” (p. 184). Secondly, Shields, Whetsell, and Hanks (2013) position that “Dewey’s inquiry integrates theory and practice by informing theory into a tool
20), is an attempt to get us to stop thinking of language as a medium. Miller clarifies that point by explaining that participants of a situation regarding discourse are historically informed actors, that the background of the subject and customs in the community in which a situation is problematized are also important. Cotkin (1995) disagrees, instead he reasons that in James’s view, the individual and the social are the arena for reconstruction, not the linguistic revisions that exist without constraints of historical, social, class, race, and gender that Rorty suggests. Cotkin defends that “James would tell Rorty to make choices in the public sphere and to approach them with passion” (p. …show more content…
217) with wide application to many public administration contexts, I accept Miller’s postmodern criticism that Shields’s pragmatism becomes “a vulgar instrument”. Shields counters that postmodernists wrongfully conflate pragmatism with positivist philosophies, pointing out that pragmatists believe there is an “external reality”; meaning is constructed without dismissing the external environment. Miller’s critique of Shields goes beyond its fervent faith in science, to a problem he locates in her ignoring the works of Rorty by insisting on a particular interpretation of Dewey’s work. To understand the significance of this lapse, we first have to understand that pragmatism was not dramatically affected by the scientific paradigm shift after Kuhn because it was already “oriented towards the problematic situation rather than generalized, universal truth (Miller, 2004a, p. 244). According to Miller (2004b), “what is needed is improvement in the methods and conditions of discourse” (p. 182), thus in pragmatic, postmodern research, “legitimation comes from these local communities, from their own discourses”, whose local inquiries attempt “to figure our which construction of reality works better given the contingencies of local contexts” (p. 184). Secondly, Shields, Whetsell, and Hanks (2013) position that “Dewey’s inquiry integrates theory and practice by informing theory into a tool