Ontological Argument Essay

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In describing the fundamental beliefs about competing ontologies, the theory and nature of existence, Margaret Stout (2012) writes, “for those who accept the basic premises of modern Western culture, it is probably difficult to imagine why public administration theorists are even talking about things like this. Don’t all rational people agree on the basics?” (p. 388). The need for such a philosophical foundation is important to public administration because ontology impacts not only theories that make claims about the way things should be, but also our assumptions about human relationships, how we go about living together, and our role as administrators (or theorists) in the governance process. As Stout notes, “as scholars and practitioners, …show more content…
It requires an uncomfortable shift away from habits of mind, a shift away from metaphysics and humanism that social constructionism maintains. Metaphysics is the study of reality, of being, of the real nature of whatever is, and is of first principles. Ontologically, it is concerned with understanding the kinds of things that constitute the world. For example, Heidegger’s philosophical hermeneutics is aimed at understanding human-being-in-the-world. Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology is also a metaphysics concerned with the essential structures of conscious experience. In contrast, Derrida and texts…. Discourse refers to the linguistic subject matter, rather than the social constructionist meaning which refers to situated use of language in social interactions (Smith, …show more content…
Burr (2015) describes postmodernism as an intellectual movement that represents the questioning of the fundamental assumptions of modernism and a rejection of both the ideas there is an ultimate truth and of structuralism, thus it “rejects the notion that social change is a matter of discovering and changing the underlying structures of social life through the application of a grand theory or metanarrative” (p. 14). However, both postmodernism and poststructuralism oppose social constructionism because they do not believe in a stable reality that can be revealed by observation and/or analysis. Miller and Fox (2007) challenge the mainstream presuppositions about the utility of postmodern thought in public administration. Postmodern thought calls into question ‘institutions’ as we know them, ontological presuppositions about society and the individual. Miller and Fox write, “postmodernism is the refusal to describe humanity’s progress as a rational process whose principles can be mastered, as though historical progress were one more step on the stairway to heaven or some teleological end” (p. x). Postmodernism is against essentialism. It problematizes presuppositions, not
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