In the Swedish Armed Forces there is a discussion whether the officer education is teaching the right things. The right things are often considered to be practical skills. However, the Swedish Defense University mostly teaches theoretical analyzing and critical approach. This study focuses on how well this approach is received by the Armed Forces, with their view of the officer needing practical skills. It does so through a survey sent to the officers in the ground forces, asking how the newly graduated second lieutenants are perceived by the organization. The result in this survey shows that this focus on theoretical knowledge has been perceived by the second lieutenant and the officers in the organization have trust in the graduates, both in character and knowledge. However, the lack of practical knowledge is considered dire and the first time after graduation is primarily focused on becoming an instructor which is considered the NCOs specialty. Because of this discrepancy the second lieutenants may have a hard time translating the theoretical knowledge to practical.

Richard Rorty's main thesis in his work Philosphy and the Mirror of Nature centers on a critique of representationalism in a fundamentally relativistic way. The aim of this disseration is to grasp Rorty's ideas in broader sense as a critique of inadequate interpretation of knowing- that and shift the attention to knowing-how as a key to new understanding the success of natural sciences. The fact that something is reproducibly possible for us to make in the surrounding world is not relative, and it is precisely in this way that technology (knowing- how) spreads so successfully even at multi-cultural level. In contrast, the explanatory function (knowing-that) of the natural sciences is relative, making sense only in the context of what is already known and accepted. Natural sciences are so successful because their experiments and only then take agreement of hypothesis with experimental practice (knowing-how) as the criterion of its acceptability. This dissertation offers, as a way out of Rortian relativism, the concept of "open authority" and proposes a new development in philosophic pragmatism based on it.