ABSTRACT
The practice movement has made an important contribution to the design disciplines and policy studies by carefully establishing that even when one is so inclined, telling the truth is not such a simple thing. The work of John Forester is exemplary in this respect. It was his initial insight that contemporary language philosophy, represented by theorists such as John Austin, and postwar critical theory, represented by Jurgen Habermas, could be applied to analyzing what “planners really do.” Both of his chapters in this section demonstrate this approach in action. At the same time, they incorporate the fruits of Forester's work in moral philosophy. They show the daily discussions in planning agencies as “practical” in the sense that they are not carried on in abstract codes totally detached from or laid over events but rather are constitutive aspects of those events. They also illustrate how policy professionals operate within highly coded discursive practices that have moral components.
