ABSTRACT
The problem-situation that gave rise to the present work is the recent rapid change in the character of the social activity of disciplined inquiry into the natural world, and the consequent changes in its understanding of itself. The established traditions of research in ‘the philosophy of science’ and in ‘the sociology of science’ have been recognized as losing contact with the actual practice and real problems of science in the present period. Quite independently of these academic studies, there has developed a new common-sense understanding of science, derived from the daily experience of working scientists and from the problems of decision and government within science. 1 There has been a rapidly increasing flow of studies of one or another aspect of science, conditioned by this new common-sense, but none as yet that attempts a new synthesis.
