ABSTRACT
For several centuries, as John Friedmann (1987) recounts in chapter one of this volume, philosophers and social scientists have adapted the principles and methods of science to the analysis of human social activity and individual behavior in an effort to explain, predict, and thereby control the uncertainties of social life. While still a viable and robust enterprise in our own day, the presuppositions and claims of the social sciences about the generalizability and objectivity of knowledge have been subjected to vigorous criticism. Planning practitioners may long for new theoretical breakthroughs that will offer a reassuring version of the rational model as a proper guide for practice, but pragmatists, likeRichard Rorty and Richard Bernstein, dismiss the quest and with it the separation between theory and practice.
