Philosophy of knowledge perspectives and the study of public administration

Abstract

PA as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry draws from the social sciences and shares the common problems and quandaries of social scientific knowledge (Homans, 1967; Little, 1991). Importantly, the meaning of the term ‘explanation’ in the social sciences is always intended to refer both to the understanding of the causes of a given set of phenomena (causation) and the giving of meaning to a social phenomenon (Psillos, 2002; Platts, 1970; Salmon, 1998). Epistemological concerns have been the subject of many works in the PA field, and countless many more in the broader social sciences – it is here treated exclusively from the perspectives of the philosophical foundations, referring the reader to general works on the topic for the field of PA (Riccucci, 2010; van Thiel, 2013). The specific contribution this book aims to make lies in revisiting logics of inquiry in public administration from the perspective of some broad philosophical themes. We have already indirectly dealt with issues of epistemology in PA throughout the whole book by discussing key philosophical traditions, each having important implications for the philosophy of knowledge: from neo-positivism to post-modernism, from critical realism to phenomenology, from historicism to pragmatism, and so on. We have also already encountered Popper’s philosophy of the social sciences and Kuhn’s notion of the competition of scientific paradigms and the related distinction between ‘normal science’, cumulative in nature within a dominant paradigm, and paradigmatic revolutions (see Chapter 3). The notion of competing paradigms probably represents the terms in which more often epistemological discussions are framed within the social sciences. However, it has been strongly argued that when it comes to PA, the field is characterised by multiplicity of paradigms, and indeed a babel of paradigms, rather than dominance of one paradigm and knowledge accumulation (Bauer, 2018; Raadschelders, 2005). There is also a conventional wisdom that three approaches dominate the field: neo-positivism; social constructivism; and critical realism. In line with