The periodic irrelevance of social science may be far easier to explain than we have thought. For in the face of ambiguous claims, little time, and unsatisfactory data, most practical people, among them public policy analysts and planners, friends and co-workers, have to learn not only about feasible outcomes and stable relationships of cause and effect but about value in our possible worlds, about potential significance, import, consequentiality. Practical people in our lives help us learn what to want, what to care about, and what we should care for, too. Yet as long as social scientists treat value as essentially irrational, an epiphenomenal dependent variable, or merely the expression of preferences, they will ignore, if not fail to understand entirely, the demands and opportunities of practical judgment and deliberative rationality, the heart of practical inquiry in the applied professions.
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