From Representing To Intervening

The shape of science has been substantially transformed in the twentieth century, and 'academic science' of early modern times has been evolved into 'post-academic science'. If academic science is typical of Enlightenment's Ideal of 'for knowledge in itself, then post-academic science has gone beyond it in many respects, such as social institutions and the nature of knowledge, and has been tightly related to economic, political, military, and cultural fields. The aim of scientific research has not been pure Truth any more. Rather it has to be responsible for related groups and interests which then put constrains on scientific activities. In order to understand these changes more deeply, we have to renew our way of philosophical studies of science, bracket the paradigm of normative epistemology, and take actual scientific practices as our starting point and focus point. In other words, we should take the naturalistic attitude toward science, and turn from the normative position to the descriptive one, which would facilitate various types and characteristics of scientific activities to be exposed more evidently.Thus science must be thought of as an enterprise of 'being-in-the-world', whose foremost task is not only representing, but intervening. The non-participant, uninvolved, and 'spectator' attitude of theoria has been long preferred by philosophers ever since ancient Greek times, according to which science is a matter of representing the world. However, in modern times scientific activities not only have been involved into other social-cultural practices, but also are a necessary power to change the world. It is very difficult to explain these phenomena in the tradition of the priority of theoria. Therefore, it is necessary that we turn from the theoria attitude to the praxis one, which would take science as an enterprise of intervening. That would drive us to this: to reinterpret science based on the practice approach. Remarkably here the concept of practice has gone out of the framework made by Aristotle who confined it to the fields of ethics and politics. Here, this concept has been enlarged and had epistemological and ontological characteristics. Philosophical studies of scientific practices will show that scientific knowledge is obtained in the course of intervening, and that the task of knowing the world is only fulfilled through changing it. If not intervening, there is no representing, and in order to represent the world, we should intervene first. As a result, epistemological and ontological issues will been inter-twisted. 'Internal epistemology' would be a reasonable choice in philosophical studies of scientific practices.