ABSTRACT
In the British Journal of Social Work Vol. 12 there is an article by Lorraine Fox called ‘Two Value Positions in Recent Child Care Law and Practice’. This was in some ways a seminal article, because it explored and outlined two contrasting views on state and agency intervention in child care work. The first view favours the preservation of natural or biological families. The second advocates a readier removal of children where the natural parenting is unsatisfactory. In a relevant article in the Journal of Social Policy, the underlabourer conception of philosophy was contrasted with one used by Ludwig Wittgenstein in ‘Philosophical Investigations’ and by one of his philosophical heirs, Peter Winch. By linking language with social context, and by carrying the analysis of language from a critique of concepts into ‘the identification of activities, practised or to be practised’, Wittgenstein forms a bridge between philosophy and social theory.
