There have been curious rumblings of late in the social sciences and the helping professions that draw from them. Increasing numbers of academics have called into question the notion that the social sciences could do for the helping professions what the natural sciences have done for engineering or biomedicine. Even the language used for articulating such notions has become suspect, as communications theorists and linguistic philosophers have turned our most fundamental social reality – being in conversation with each other – into a matter of critical reflection. At the same time, larger cultural issues have come to the fore. Where are women and minority culture people represented in the so-called universal knowledge of ‘man’ to be applied in helping others? The very foundations of what seemed a secure knowledge base have been under assault. New helping practices, and ways of thinking about them, have been emerging that look positively anarchic compared to orderly helping protocols and received social scientific knowledge about humans, and humans in interaction. The ideals of enlightenment science, applied to human endeavours and concerns, if you go along with the critics, come up short in delivering the equivalents of the kinds of understandings and practices that get bridges built, or people on the moon.