Nursing practice involves the nurse as an agent for deliberation and action in the daily confrontation of situations. Using scientific knowledge, previous experiences, self-developed concepts and intuition, the nurse applies specific views of seeing and acting in nursing practice. Acting, therefore, constitutes a source of knowledge accessible by inquiry methods of an interpretative perspective. The objective of this paper is to analytically present the Action-Science philosophy in its relation to constructing nursing knowledge. Action-Science is explained as an innovative method of inquiry and its philosophic tradition in the social sciences is explored. Its philosophic tenets are discussed in their relation to the epistemological proposal of nursing. The use of this investigative approach is encouraged for nursing studies because of its focus on reflection and on practice as a source of knowledge. It is concluded that Action-Science has potential for advancing specific nursing practice theory from nursing knowledge itself.
Nursing; Epistemology; Methodology; Professional practice