Abstract
In this chapter, it is argued that management is a relationship based on rational authority – or reasoned elaboration – and its main vehicle is argumentation. Authoritarian management, on the other hand, is based on a rejection of argumentation in favor of base rhetoric in the form of management jargon. If managers aspire to authoritative status by criticizing the obfuscating jargon and pretentious nonsense that characterizes much management discourse, the study of philosophy is especially indicated. Philosophers can provide the tools by which hundreds of pages of meaningless jargon can be reduced to a few pages of truth-bearing propositions. Two important tools in this endeavor are nominalism and Hume’s Fork.
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
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Spillane, R. (2022). Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work. In: Neesham, C., Reihlen, M., Schoeneborn, D. (eds) Handbook of Philosophy of Management. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_3
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