Why Old Pragmatism Needs an Upgrade

Abstract

The working hypothesis of this essay is: If we upgraded pragmatism from the old, classic version to the newer version, public administration would work better.I very much appreciated Patricia M. Shields's wonderful article on "The Community of Inquiry" in the November 2003 edition of Administration & Society. She draws scholarly attention to the pragmatic frame of reference and thereby contributes mightily to public administration theory and epistemology. But I wish she would take a closer look at the work of Richard Rorty (1999). Rorty, a great admirer of John Dewey, is the leading pragmatist today and America's most famous living philosopher. His work is amazingly accessible given its level of sophistication.

A View from the Trenches

“…That is what practitioners get paid to do. In this context, Miller's (2004) statement seems not only wrong but also patronizing and divisive. Miller (2004) went on to assert, "Pragmatism brings a sense of limitation into public administration thought" (p. 245).…”

“…On page 245, Miller (2004) contended, "New pragmatism raises new possibilities." This statement seems reasonable until he further claimed that traditional public administration is handcuffed by the problems it addresses and "is constituted not by laws" (Miller, 2004, p. 245).…”

Reconciling the Varieties of Pragmatism in Public Administration

“…Neopragmatism has its place in public administration, but its more zealous promotion of linguistic analysis limits its own relevance, like the RP pragmatism of O. C. McSwite (1997), 5 to questions about legitimacy. Also, neopragmatism's rejection of experience tends to alienate practitioners, a point about which Miller (2004) received considerable criticism (see Evans, 2005;Hickman, 2004;Shields, 2004Shields, , 2005Shields, , 2008Snider, 2005;Stolcis, 2004;Webb, 2004). Unfortunately, the distinction between experience and language is ignored by Snider (2011), whose focus is an aspect of pragmatism that all pragmatists happen to agree: the individual lives by means of a community.…”

“…However, there are important distinctions between them. Primarily, neopragmatists, such as Hugh T. Miller (2004), reject experience as "a word shaped object." Snider noted this important distinction in 2005 but avoids it presently.…”

Classical Pragmatism

“…He never tires of driving home the point that the quest for certainty, "for the immutable and indubitable is incompatible with the acknowledgement of the autonomy of the self-correcting process of inquiry" (Kaufmann, 1950, p. 219; see also Dewey, 1920). Miller (2004) used a correspondence theory 10 of language to assert that experience is a foundational concept in classical pragmatism. In other words, Miller asserted that classical pragmatism includes a "direct, denotative link between words and fact" (Miller, 2004, p. 244).…”