Science, Practice, Language, and the Return of Human Use

Science, Practice, Language, and the Return of Human Use examines a central problem of modern philosophy: how can knowledge remain connected to human life when science, technical systems, and increasingly powerful forms of mediation reshape the way we understand and act in the world?Moving from the philosophy of science to practice, language, meaning, and human use, Ma Lin explores both the achievements and the limits of modern philosophical attempts to secure knowledge through method, theory, and abstraction. The book argues that scientific explanation is indispensable, but explanation alone cannot exhaust the meaning of human experience. Practice is not merely the application of theory, and language is not simply a transparent instrument for representing reality.Through sustained philosophical analysis, the book examines how knowledge acquires significance within forms of life, how language both reveals and constrains understanding, and why human judgment cannot be fully replaced by formal systems or technical procedures. These questions become increasingly important in an age of artificial intelligence, when information, reasoning, and decision-making are progressively mediated by computational systems.As Book Two of The Contradictions of Philosophy’s Contradictions, this volume continues the series’ examination of what philosophy has achieved, where its internal tensions remain unresolved, and how philosophical inquiry can return from abstraction to practice, responsibility, and human use.Rather than rejecting science or technology, the book asks how they can remain situated within a genuinely human horizon-one in which knowledge serves life without reducing human beings to passive users of systems they no longer understand.