Actions and Decisions: Pragmatism Gateway to Artful Analytic Management Philosophizing

How management philosophy is conceived depends on if pragmatism is acknowledged or not! After having been under the main domination of management science both research and education has until recently widened its scope from a decision-making to an action-perspective. It seems to be a recent reconnection to pragmatism that makes the 2011 Carnegie report propose to rethink management in liberal arts terms, whilst the vastly influential 1959 Carnegie Pierson report distanced itself from American pragmatism thus focusing on decisions and forgetting actions. Actions may contain decisions and choices but contain more than that. A decision-perspective explains by causal inference modelling choices as calculated or programmed. The action-perspectives strive at understanding intentions of agents by philosophical interpretations of action stories. It is less limited to finding the logics for constructing worlds, to paraphrase Herbert Simon’s favorite philosopher Rudolf Carnap, than embarking on plausible, although not certain, reconstructions of intentions giving meaning to action stories. This can be illustrated by turning to Elizabeth Anscombe’s Wittgensteinian investigation of intentions as Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning. Her constant analytical care to defend a philosophy of action against metaphysical assumptions and taken-for-granted “psychologisms” shows that an action-perspective is as analytic as ever one of decision-making. What differs is that the latter seems constantly attracted by programming inquiry by “scientific methodology” whilst the latter is charmed by philosophical approaches to action welcoming fascinating conundrums, enigmas and human goofs in the reality of managerial practice. Management science wants to reduce management to logics, programs and models for formal decision making whereas management philosophy is closer to spotting the artfully entrepreneurial in actions. The latter points in the direction of engineering tools, the former to appreciate the toys of management as artwork. Finally the argument of Georg Henrik von Wright helps us see that the two are philosophically compatible; for in a pragmatically inspired management philosophy actions may well contain decisions.

Keywords Decision making . Philosophy of action . Syllogism . Intention . Logical empiricism . Interpretation

X or Y; Modes of Management Philosophizing
In searching for the pragmatist turn in management philosophy we start by considering two managers X and Y each philosophizing in a different rational mode.
X assumes that what people do in business occurs due to causes which one tries to unmask and explain. For this purpose X will construct normative models which outcomes have to be tested against what really happens in the firm.
Y, on the contrary, focuses on observing behavior. He will then ponder about why people do what they do in hope it will help improve knowledge of management in practice.
It seems X goes about doing management science in the spirit of the Cowles Commission and the first Carnegie Report on business education from 1959 (Pierson 1959). The way Y does philosophize might be inspired by the more recent report from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession (Colby and et al. 2011). The first report advocated management as a science the second wants management to be taught in a liberal arts tradition.
At a first glance X might seem a-philosophical whilst Y adopts a more reflective style. Intellectual history of economic thought, that has largely inspired both western Anglo Saxon academic research and education in management, however tells us that X-and Y-management; although different, both rest on philosophical assumptions. Friedrich Hayek (1967) for instance reminded that contributions to economics from Berkeley, Hume, Smith, Bentham, the Mills, Jevons, Sidgewick, and Keynes are philosophical. Research of e.g. von Neuman and Morgenstern is inseparable from neo-Kantian philosophy and the logical empiricism of the Vienna circle (Hayek 1949a, b;Lachmann 1976;Kraft 1968). Not only learned economists like Hayek or Keynes consciously worked in philosophical crossroads exchanging with Wittgenstein, Schlick, Russel or Popper. Management scientist also built on philosophical foundations; for instance Herbert Simon was severely taken with Vienna-cricle philosopher Rudolf Carnap (Simon 1991) and operations-and systems-research pioneer West Churchman was trained as a philosopher by pragmatist Edgar A. Singer. Contemporary economics, as well as its managerial offsprings, are as firmly rooted on analytic philosophy as Smith, Mill, Marshall, and of course Marx once were in more synthetic ways philosophizing. So X as well as Yare, at least implicitly, depend on philosophical foundations when managing.
The fact that it remains unclear if X or Yare the right ways of considering management depend on their philosophical roots. The longevity of both economic and management doctrines is namely accounted for by their philosophic status. In a philosophical struggle between philosophical perspectives in economics there is, as Joan Robinson pointed out, Bno agreed procedure for knocking out errors^ (Robinson 1962 p.76). In management philosophy too the issue at stake is therefore not to settle if X or Y is best, but to investigate how their philosophizing differ and where it leads. I suggest that the difference can be traced back to the impact of pragmatism and that pragmatism in management philosophy leads to taking Art into account.

Action Stories; Poetic Cases for Management Philosophizing
The kind of analytic management philosophy here treated is triggered by practical cases. This goes also for more general analytic philosophies of action in the light of which the philosophizing of management scholars, consultants or organization experts can be made explicit. Management cases in business education have the same role as the concrete Baction stories^that seem trigger the philosophizing of academic action philosophers. To stimulate philosophical reflection a management case has to be more than a simple statement of a problem to be solved by a given technique. Management cases and action stories have in common that both beg, even hunger, for reflection. In other words; they might have literary, poetic or even aesthetic qualities to set off a lively discussion in class or a reflective conversation in practice. Actions stories do the same in the academy. Analytic philosophy of action takes its departure from simple but somehow enigmatic stories like that of someone observed moving a limb, e.g. arm, leg or a certain finger (Melden 1973). An action story is, in other words, supposed to be about something which took or takes place beyond doubt. A philosophical action story is told, or more precisely observed and depicted, with an elegant minimum of words and maximum of concreteness. On its narrative surface the Bfrosty^story longs for philosophical reflection to Bwarm^it up. Action stories seem simple but, I think, not banal as some pedagogical instruction to a matter already told by the philosopher. Nor are action stories designed on purpose to be mysterious like a fragment occasionally torn away from its context in order to sound odd and mystical. They are like images showing what somebody did or does, rather than epics of collective action. As Elizabeth Anscombe, favorite student of Ludwig Wittgenstein and subsequently crowned Queen of philosophy of action, remarks it is the sort of thing "you would say in a law court without reflection and certainly without adverting to observation" (Anscombe 1957 p 8). As said it is mostly a story about bodily events, the silent movement of legs and fingers, where much is left to be understood rather than the muscular contraction of an iris or erection of a penis. Confronted with the action story the philosopher now starts thinking how one could go about explaining it. The analytic management philosopher really thinks about it and doesn't do something. Neither will the philosopher jump out in the world of action nor will he completely retire in philosophical speculation about human nature or its true Bgeist^. The latter attitude is not attractive for an analytical philosopher who, given his scientific and sceptic inclinations, wants to find out what really and certainly could be said about this very human action. In doing so he will however show much Wittgensteinian awareness of the fact that both the action story and its explanation will be uttered in words whose meaning in turn give the meaning to the explained story. Now this philosophic sense-making could take two routes; that of X or Y.

Explaining Causes and…
In his combat against religious superstition Hume (1955 p.74) skeptically discarded all notions of Bpower^or Bnecessary connections^. Instead he preferred talking of cause and effect saying that we could "only find that the one does actually in fact follow the other". Philosophy of action is marked by the same fear of mysticism when questioning what makes us act. After the linguistic turn there is an awareness of the tautological trap of first defining implicitly an action as intentional and secondly, trying to find the very intention which makes it intentional. In her essay BIntentions^Anscombe (1957) discussed the problem of distinguishing intentional actions from nonintentional ones. Take the action story of someone moving his arm and ask him Bwhy?^. If you search for an intention you look for a Breason to act-answer^by which the agent makes sense of what is done. But how do you know whether the answer really is a clue to a cause rather than a reason to act? What is the difference between a cause and a reason?
Due to the state of great confusion of the topic of causality miss Anscombe (1957 p.10) finds it impossible to answer this question. A hasty answer, by which one simply postulates why action is undertaken, tends to be a moralistic statement of what we consider rational. To say that only those actions, which are voluntary or done with free will, are intentional ones is hardly a solution because the concept of intention is so closely related to the concept of free will that a tautological definition is unavoidable. Is it ever possible to tell whether an action is intentional? So where does this sort of philosophizing lead?
It seems that it leads X and Y in different directions. The complex queries of causes, reasons and intentions might frighten totally X and lead him to follow Humes causal tradition that hypothesize mental states that, according to some psychological theory, can in turn be traced back to motives which are said to push or pull man to act. In other words; X makes use of models of man in philosophizing. Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgensteins successor at Cambridge, labels this philosophizing an BExplanation^in the Galilean tradition (Wright von 1971). In such Explanation actions are seen as effected by causes making man, as Hume is famous for saying, a ball on billiard table. Management philosophy might thus end up in management science; the restless philosopher has found peace as a modelling technician of science designing management worlds. This might be OK for X but for a management philosopher like Y this is seldom the end of story.
…Understanding Intentions Whilst X is satisfied with a theoretical causal model Y feels that calling something an action begs a deeper investigation for, as von Wright puts it; you "understand a behavior as the outer aspect of an action by spotting an intention in it"(Wright von 1971, p. 124). Philosophizing again takes off when action stories are bugging you. Let us take a typically simple action story of a man seen pressing a doorbell. BI am ringing the doorbell^says the man when asked why. Another Bwhyŵ ill perhaps get the reply Bto wake up my aunt^. These are descriptions given by the agent himself of what he knows himself to do without observing it and in her investigation of intentions Elizabeth Anscombe coined the expression of an action being intentional Bunder a certain description^. Such a description, the way of an agent to make sense of what he does, may be lacking if the man asked would just blush exclaiming BOh, I am sorry^.
As we understand we here embark on tricky philosophizing and at this point it might therefore be tempting to turn away from reality, to skip the empirical and go for pure logics of a nice causal model. To drop Y's philosophizing and go for X's mode of explanation. In the history of economic philosophy this despair facing a complex political reality might have pushed English utilitarians into becoming a logicians´sect preaching a normative gospel of Bmaximizing happiness^that later slipped into the management principle of Bprofit maximization^. We also know that such a societal Bmanagement science^forced John Stuart Mill (1879) to leave X; his father's extreme Utilitarianism based on fixed principles and return to Y; philosophizing in the mood of realism that later became a main source of inspiration for American pragmatism.

Practical Inside/Outside Knowledge
John Stuart Mill was not happy with the Bmaximum happiness^doctrine and Miss Anscombe is also unhappy, although less dramatically than Mill, with abstract causal models for explaining human action by psychologisms masquerading as concrete facts. This, I think, is the main point in Anscombe's introducing the practical syllogism, mentioned by Aristotle in the Nicomachian ethic (Anscombe 1957 p.7) The practical syllogism is namely never to be taken as a fool proof device or method for exact mirroring of agents intentions in actions. She says BArtistotle's practical reasoning or my order of the questions 'why?' (Anscombe 1957 p.80) can be looked at as a device which reveals the order that there is in this chaos^. But she still insists this is all about Bknowledge^although a much more practical concept of knowledge more in the spirit of ancient and medieval philosophers than modern science. This kind of practical knowledge Anscombe understands as Bknowledge without observation^. She was unhappy with the utterly contemplative conception of knowledge in modern philosophy. Anscombe's contribution to analytical philosophy is often thought of as the reintroduction of, what von Wright in his book BExplanation and Understandingl abels, the Aristotelian tradition of understanding action that counterbalances the Galilean models for human action explanation.
An example of knowledge without observation is "that a man usually knows the position of his limbs without observation" (Anscombe 1957 p.13) To Anscombe this is knowledge despite a lack of methods for empirical scientific observation. She will not call it Bmerely being able to say^or Bthink it to be^(Anscombe 1957 p.14) She is now able to define intentional actions as a subclass of those actions in a man's history that he really and certainly knows about not just because he observed them. Such knowledge exists not only in the case of bodily action. When somebody asks you what you are doing when you are opening a window, your answer BI'm opening the window^is also a kind of knowledge without observation. Likewise if you are caught munching cookies and somebody asks you Bwhy do you eat?^your reply, "I didn't know I was eating!" actually denies that you have knowledge without observation. But the action of window opening and cookie munching could also be known by observation. Then as "what I do with my arm and hand by moving the window" respectively "what I do when transferring cookies from the box into my big mouth". In other words there are "two different knowledges of exactly the same action" one and which is important, both are true. For an action there are, we can say, both inside and outside knowledge.
This important point implies that Anscombe refutes that knowledge without observation, inside knowledge, is knowledge about something else than the action itself, for instance the will to act or the plan of the action. Neither the will nor a plan could be proved to exist in our minds and therefore how could one ever claim knowing something about them? Of course this implies that she rejects the idea of us knowing something about an intention located behind and before, as a Humean cause would be, the action.
Intentions therefore could not be said to be things which are researchable like Hume's "the secret springs and principles actuating the human mind" that have so inspired model builders of modern management science. It is not a mental act nor a characteristic experience accompanying the action. Very familiar with Anscombes Wittgensteinian approach, von Wright says that non-observational knowledge certainly not is based on reflection about myself or my inner states but rather "is the intentionality of my behaviour and its association with an intention to achieve something" (Wright von 1971 p.114). A management philosopher adhering to this perspective slips from his Simonite original position of a scientist explaining behavior in the Galilean tradition to that of also becoming a management phenomenologist understanding being in action in an Aristotelian mood.

Syllogisms of Practical Reasoning
The Aristotelian tradition makes use of syllogisms to tackle action. Elizabeth Anscombe quotes Aristotle's famous example of a syllogism for practical reasoning: Dry food suits any human Such-and-such food is dry I am human This is a bit of such-and-such food Yielding the conclusion; This food suits me.
In discussing such practical reasoning she emphasizes that the Aristotelian syllogism neither is an imperative order from an authority to someone to do something nor a way of expressing that something is right to do because it fits some law. Practical reasoning is not a proof of something which is true because it is rooted on true premises and therefore ought to entail action. Syllogistic reasoning is not a way to normatively state an ought that should impact an is. It therefore hardly fits the management philosophy of orthodox utilitarianism. As syllogism does not make or depict programmed imperatives or universal routines they seem rather to be in tune with the pragmatist questioning of given doctrines and universal truths. I think it is also interesting to note that Anscombe explicitly denies that practical reasoning, either in her or Aristotle's version, has anything to do with ethics. A practical syllogism is Bsimply^a way of arguing that something is suitable or pleasant to do and to propose such argument we do not at all need to assume some universal, higher and metaphysically ethical premise of goodness such as for instance an utilitarian rule for maximizing happiness. Anscombe seems to think that those who accept and blindly obey universal premises are those who act in a way we usually call Binsane^ (Anscombe 1957. 61). Therefore it is quite in order that someone changes his intention to another one, forgets about it or simply drops it. The actor is in other words human. When we want to explain the action story we must carefully think over possibilities and articulate the practical argument so that it becomes reasonable in that particular action case.
Syllogisms are not hard models but soft ways of understanding reasonable action in management philosophizing. This seems the main point in von Wright's showing how careful analysis can develop an initial first crude syllogism as the one in the following example (Wright von 1971 p.96); A intends to bring about p A considers that he cannot bring about p unless he does a Therefore A sets himself to do a von Wright (Wright von 1971 p.107) then shows how philosophizing can carefully sharpens this crude and abstract syllogism into a more concrete, even more human, and practical version of how A:s action: From now on A intends to bring about p at time t From now on A considers that, unless he does a no later at time t1, he cannot bring about p at time t. Therefore no later than when he thinks time t1 has arrived, A sets himself to do a, unless he forgets about the time or is prevented.
In this case philosophizing starts with the action story reporting that A does a. von Wright mentions four simple aspects for developing a careful concrete syllogism of an abstract crude, or what he calls Bincomplete^(von Wright Wright von 1971 p.100) syllogism.
First we may ask how come A did a, if he could also be thought of doing B to reach his purpose in t? In other words; did A consider a sufficient action to attain his end? This question may make us consider problems of choice and additional syllogisms to explain why A was chosen and not b. Here we see how management philosophers, contrary to decision theorists, consider the very partial role of decisions in a practical argument as a "further teleological explanation for his choice" (Wright von 1971 pp. 99-100).
Secondly what makes the syllogism more concrete and practical is whether it holds even if A thinks or knows that he cannot do a. Anscombe (1957) already brought up the point when stating: "The wanting that interests us, however, is neither wishing nor hoping nor the feeling of desire, and cannot be said to exist in a man who does nothing towards getting what he wants. The primitive sign of wanting is trying to get ..." (Anscombe 1957 p.67-8) Therefore A will never intend to do p if he knows that a is necessary and is not confident that he can do it. Nor will he intend p if he can do a but thinks that b, which he can't do, is also necessary. If he however really wants he will try harder and this trying harder could, in turn, be explained by a syllogism whose conclusion is that; "A sets himself to learn to do a." (Wright von 1971 p.101) Here von Wright indicates the place of what may be called a partial technological explanation. Both the economical and the technological explanations are, according to von Wright's analysis, subsidiary to the elaboration of a careful practical argument for the action story of BA doing a^.
Thirdly a practical syllogism should be specified as to time. If someone has an intention at time t, the syllogism must assume that he keeps the intention until specified time t1 when he actually will do a. Furthermore, von Wright (Wright von 1971) specifies that someone could actually forget about time while keeping the intention.
Finally the fourth consideration concerns prevention. Only physical prevention taking place so rapidly that "there is no time for changing one's intention" is relevant (Wright von 1971 p107). Threats or other kinds of psychological prevention do not have to be taken into account for the simple reason that someone prevented psychologically actually, although reluctantly, makes up his mind to give up his intention.

Decision-Making; Leaving Philosophizing
This suffices for illustrating how analytic philosophizing in the Y mode goes about developing more careful and concrete syllogisms from the original crude Aristotelian template by considering time, physical prevention, and possible partial syllogisms concerning decision and confidence in technology. But at this point manager X might feel it odd to see Bdecision-making^dethroned from its dominant position as action explanations in management science. For half a century managers have been trained to regard decision-making the true basis of business action. Herbert Simon, philosopher king of management research and education, founded this explanatory paradigm of logical empiricism, rational choice and agency theory on old utilitarianism and positivism (Statler and Guillet de Monthoux 2015) . In the 1950ties the young and ambitious Simon waged hard philosophical battles against old school American political theorists like Dwight Waldo who were undoubtedly working in an intellectual atmosphere much more in tune with pragmatism. In his verdict on Waldo he writes….
B..I do not see how we can progress in political philosophy if we continue to think and write in the loose, literary, metaphorical style that he and most other political theorists adopt. ( Simon 1991 p.135).
It does not seem too daring to see Herbert Simon's whole oeuvre is an impressive and influential effort to move not only political philosophy toward explanation. In management philosophy this has, explicitly, meant focusing on positive Bdecision-making^, implicitly then, turning his back on influences from American pragmatist influences. It became the task of management education to convince manager Y to go for manager X's philosophizing. Herbert Simon success did not depend on the decision-making method alone.
To uphold the dominant position of Explanatory Humean methodology utilitarians had to indoctrinate management philosophers into the method of Bcalculus^. This was a painful drill well accounted for by John Stuart Mill (1879) touching autobiographical account for what James Mill and friends early forced on him. To survive young John Stuart had to run away from the sects into which he was born. When articulating his new philosophical position that he wrote a text that fueled the ideas of pragmatists wanted to brake free from doctrines of general truths and authoritarian social organizing. In both Georg Henrik von Wright and Elizabeth Anscombe (1957) reflections on action and norms, principles, laws or conventions we can detect a similar position. To them the normative can never be considered full explanations of actions and that someone is managed; commanded, ordered or asked to do something does not suffice as cause explaining an action. The management philosopher must go beyond the formal organization by questioning on what makes the individual conform to structures of norms. This implies management philosophy cannot refer to rules of conduct to shy away from understanding intentions to conform (Nordenfelt 1974 p.16).
Like Johns Stuart Mill (1879) the manager philosopher does not accept rules and organizing as full accounts of action. Insofar as decision-making is a matter of following a set method its international depth should not be ignored by the management philosopher. If they accept to follow the rules we must understand their conformism. And conformism is an action too! But today this might be tricky for when Simon, more than a century after method-driven utilitarianism, pushed decision-making on management philosophy he no longer had to rely on disciplining managers' minds into conforming to method. Theories and methods became, much thanks to Simon's pioneering work, inbuilt in machines replacing minds and automatizing human action. Simon seized the opportunities of technology for designing decisionmaking with algorithms and programs replacing theories and philosophies. Thanks to the performativity of Simon's paradigm decision-making is today materialized, harnessed and embedded in computer technology. Herbert Simon himself was very operational for making us look at business firms as international business machines. In the theory of the firm elaborated by Simon's disciples there seems little place for management philosophizing; it is all about designing rational theories for decision-making.

Return of Philosophizing
For complex reasons outside the scope of article the decision-making paradigm is today no longer unchallenged in management philosophy. One alternative actually comes from the neo-liberal rereading of economic philosophies that always has claimed that a logic of human action can never become anything else than a pattern of thought philosophically ascribed to an observed actor. Economists, in contrast to management engineer and programmers, would therefore seldom give logical formulas any ontological status. Hayek was for instance adamant to underline that economics is about humans and Bimpute to (an agent)…something beyond what we can observe ... not because of any objective or physical similarity but because of the (imputed) intention of the acting person (Hayek 1949a, b p63, 61). Therefore we could never be sure that we are right although our logic may prove workable in practice. Machlup (1946) made the same point in his classical article directed at some economists who thought they were on the verge of empirically proving that marginal analysis logic was wrong.
"Beginning students of economics who watch their instructor draw demand and cost curves covering half the blackboard may be misled into believing that the businessman is supposed to visualize the possibilities of producing and selling amounts of output ranging from almost zero up to two or three times the amounts he is currently producing and selling ... (the) curve draftsman, indeed, seems to ascribe extraordinary powers of imagination to the business wizards. ..^ (Machlup 1946 p.522).
Economists, especially the marginalists classics here helping rediscover economics as a philosophy, are usually careful to emphasize the abstract and logical sense of their thought when they talk of people being regarded as if they were rational. Nevertheless, due to unscrupulous lecturers' wanting to be popular and pedagogical and to students' unaware of the philosophical, logical content of economics and its diagrams, models and reasoning take on a false material costume of something in real space and clock time. This leads to total confusion and obscures the fact that a logic can "never be verified or falsified by reference to facts ... only tested for its consistency" as any mental scheme of interpretation. For those who dislike faith-based assumptions, like for instance pragmatists, there is no way to contour philosophy. The status of for instance a pure theory of choice is no less different to that of an Anscombian practical syllogism. Simply because economic logic seems to be mathematics about concrete everyday things and that philosophers treat abstract subjects in everyday concrete language we should not forget about their abstract nature. To Hayek the understanding of human action is like an updated version of what Aristotle did: "If we consider for a moment the simplest kinds of actions where this problem arises, it becomes of course, rapidly obvious that, in discussing what we regard as people's conscious actions, we invariably interpret their action on the analogy of our own mind: That is that we group their actions, and the objects of their actions, into classes or categories which we know solely from the knowledge of our own mind." (Hayek 1949a, b p.63).
Friedrich Hayek's Austrian colleague Ludwig von Mises adds that…. "…economics is not about things and tangible material objects; it is about men, their meanings and actions. Goods, commodities, and wealth and all the other notions of conduct are not elements of nature; they are elements of human meaning and conduct." (Mises von 1949 p.92).
But when economists go about explaining human action they do not, I think, reconstruct the total syllogism but concentrate on what they think is the rational part of it (Hayek 1937, 46). Economists assume that "a sensible ordering of our lives demands that we should have a clear conception of our aims before we start acting" (Hayek 1967 p.82) and this assumption leads to the so called pure logic of choice. This is called Bpure^because it amounts to part of a practical inference which alternatingly in economic texts is called planning, decision, choice or valuation process. Again it is important to keep in mind that this is a reconstruction of what may happen in the mind of one individual subject in one single Bsolitary^ (Schackle 1972 p.245) moment called the decision point. Decisions are thought to be made on the basis of Bdata^which are "all facts given to the person in question, the things as they are known to (or believed by) him to exist, and not in any sense objective facts" (Hayek 1937). A plan is a set of actions decided upon at one point in time. A person's actions are said to be in equilibrium when they could be understood as part of one and the same plan.
Revisiting older texts in liberal economics make the philosophizing clear and its connection to analytical philosophy of action obvious. Both explain action stories, i.e. bits and pieces of behavior. Now, some may claim that economists actually explain decisions, valuations, planning and intentions etc. But how could they ever explain something which is part of their syllogism? To put it roughly decisions (and other parts of the syllogism) do never exist, they are not made as things are, only eventually thought by the actor and certainly by the economist himself or as Thirlby (1946) puts it; "it is the logical starting point for any investigation which seeks any explanation of why production or industrial structure is what it is" which to the actor himself Bwould perhaps be quite unintelligible^.

Constructive or Critical Rationalism?
In a video recorded conversation (1987) between Swedish professor Kristo Ivanov, a computer scientist, and philosopher West Churchman the latter pointed out that he started out a logician trained by pragmatist philosopher Edgar Singer. He had spent half his career making computer models for business practice but then turned to broader systems philosophy focused on the empirical application and use and abuse of management models. Churchman might have been a case of what Thirlby (1946) noted; taking logics as a starting point for empirical explorations! What seems to distance management science from philosophizing is the opposite route, going from the empirical to logics or even dwelling in logics without ever bothering about the experience of the messy realities. Just think of the difference between the Blogical empiricism^and Bempirical logicisim^which, if it exists, would be nothing but an antithesis to pragmatism. The latter way of doing management would probably be identified by Hayek as the pitfall of Bconstructive rationalism^. Instead Hayek recommends the way he calls Bcritical rationalism^; going mixing logics with a deep respect for reality and its practical reasoning since the analysis of what people can do can only start from what is known to them^and this knowledge is necessarily subjective although to a large extent based on objective facts. Hayek bases this argument on philosophical reflections that society is based on human action made on the basis of strictly personal knowledge so scattered and unequally distributed that no central planning agency or computer may be able to organize it all or reproduce it in any form. To a critical rationalist the actions each actor in society depends on this kind of unobservable and unscientific knowledge. To constructive rationalists this may be very hard to accept especially if they are trained at management schools presenting management as science striving for prediction and control of economic phenomena. To view management as a natural science would imply that human action was explained by causal inference.
Pragmatist Empirical Renaissance and the Creation of Logical Art-Tefacts.
The Pierson report from 1959 has long ruled management research and education. After half a century dominance of the scientific decisions-making paradigm a new report (Colby and et al. 2011) advocating a much more open philosophical way of conceiving management. To the LERCAT paradigm marked by Logical Empiricism, Rational Choice and Agency Theory a new CAPRA perspective suggesting Collective Action, Practical Reasoning and the Arts seems to emerge (Statler and Guillet de Monthoux 2015). This is the broader context of an increased interest in pragmatism that entails a shift from management science focusing on decision-making to a more open and soft management philosophizing. Pragmatism acts as a refreshingly unorthodox way of opening up to new interpretations of knowledge in practical reasoning. It focuses on action and intentions and thus rediscovers the charms and thrills of understanding and interpreting human beings. As more technical developments move away from management school to engineering laboratories where hardware is developed and built there will, back in management schools, perhaps be more tolerance for the openness of pragmatist kind. After a half a century of orthodox management science drill forged by anti-pragmatist Simonites we may enter an era welcoming those who rediscover Hayek, take an interest in Wittgenstein and se Dwight Waldo and West Churchman for being at least as inspiring as Herbert Simon.
Finally this may, perhaps paradoxically, imply that our two management philosophers X and Y can co-habit and co-operate. X no longer can ignore that his credo rests on philosophical grounds actually not that far from those of Y he might have thought. Tomorrows management philosophizing will forget about X and Y as polarized alternatives. In the preface of his book Explanation and Understanding von Wright indicates the unhappy dichotomy of decision and intention against which his book is actually directed. The causalist, with his scientific outlook, can with no risk admit the crucial role of intention-driven experimentation in the formation of the concept of cause and since experimentation in itself is a mode of intentional action Baction is conceptually fundamental to causation." (Wright von 1971 p.3).
X might today still construct logical models but his software will today be incorporated in hardware technology sold and used as distinct pieces of business machinery regarded as objective artefacts. By selling models as things, instead of disciplining and brainwash agents to conform to models, X will gain mental freedom and dare engaging in conversations with Y who in his quest to understanding intentions probably make use of X's apps as inspiring philosophical tools. The tools will turn to toys and decisions will slip out their old corporate normative prisons making agents acknowledging action and enterprise. This might even be the case when bio-and neurotechnologies create embodied artefacts and prostheses. Is it maybe easier to let bondage bodies loos by new brake dances than to cure the illness of mental managerial disorders? Pragmatist philosophy and it's action and intention oriented search therefore maybe no longer constitutes a threat to X's work, as he will be mostly responsible for crafting the logics in shape of technical tools instead of maintaining order and imposing discipline in business organizations by indoctrinating causal control systems to suppress unwanted intentions by manage people to think as machines. Y and X can calmly enjoy common projects triggered by poetic qualities of managerial action stories and enjoy the aesthetic pleasure of art-facts created by managerial engineers.