How scientific understanding is mobilized (or, made instrumental) in the world is never straight-forward. Not only that, but, to hear Peter Dear tell it, techne - the event of creating meaningful change in the world - is a wholly separate type of scientific experience than is scientia - the creation of natural philosophy. Throughout the history of western science these two contrasting, and sometimes conflicting, aspects of scientific pursuit of traded places of preeminence. For Newton, scientia - speaking meaningfully about the world - became more a question of process than of intelligible knowledge resulting. This tension is far from innocent.
Dear's most powerful insight is the extent to which natural philosophy and instrumentality have, by needs, developed an intimate relationship of accommodation across scientific history. While intelligibility is itself an irreducible category - either a concept makes sense or it doesn't - the ability to move the world - concerns of instrumentality - fulfill a certain burden of proof. Whether instrumentality is the result of truthful application of prior understanding, or whether application is the only adequate measure of true knowledge, matters greatly when we are concerned with knowing the world around us.
The history of science primarily endeavors to reveal the pursuit of knowledge creation in the sciences as a far from given, monolithic history of obvious discovery. Why and how past peoples thought differently about the world they inhabited, and how this context influenced (and indeed, influences) the changing prospects of human understanding, is inseparable from the types of science engaged in and how the human and nonhuman world continues to be transformed. Peter Dear gives a punchy overview of the debates in western science (largely since the Enlightenment and scientific revolution). While the he-said, he-said aspect of the debates between different thinkers can come across as a bit cumbersome to the uninitiated, it is crucial to Dear's thesis to investigate how different thinkers were situated within a scientific community, and the extent to which this community formed understandings of natural philosophy. He admirably walks a difficult tight-rope: situating research and discovery in time and space while not falling into the trap of social determination. This is an admirable introduction for those interested in thinking about how social and natural philosophical aspects of scientific understanding grow together and influence one another.
