ABSTRACT
The history of social policy and its future are the work of those who address the urgent questions raised by the idea of justice. In this chapter, the authors try to remain faithful to some of the useful consequences of what is sometimes called the 'linguistic' or 'discursive shift' in the social sciences. They do not accept the proposition that any preoccupation with talk or discourse indicates that the authors have given up any interest in pursuing truth. It has certainly been observed often enough that the 'discursive shift' relies on an epistemological 'scepticism' about the very possibility of truth, signifying a shift in intellectual protocols and assumptions often associated with 'post-modernist' and 'anti-foundationalist' trends. Anti-foundationalists from Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century to Ian Hacking and Richard Rorty in our time have been suspicious about traditional strategies designed to 'capture' truth while still pursuing truth as a kind of regulative idea.
