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The history of scientific practices is the study of what scientists and other knowledge-makers actually do: the techniques they use, the materials they handle, the records they keep, the places they work, and the skills they pass on. It asks not only what was believed at a given time, but how those beliefs were produced, stabilized, and made credible. Where the intellectual history of science focuses on theories, concepts, and arguments, the history of scientific practices focuses on the embodied, material, and social routines through which those theories came to count as knowledge.
A "practice" in this context is a repeatable, learned way of doing something that carries knowledge within it. It is not a single action but a patterned activity with its own standards of success. Examples include the calibration of an instrument, the preparation of a specimen, the keeping of a laboratory notebook, the taking of a measurement, the drawing of a diagram, or the conduct of a field survey. Each of these activities embeds assumptions about what counts as a good result, what errors look like, and what evidence is worth recording.
The subfield treats these practices as historically variable. The way a naturalist collected specimens in the eighteenth century differed from the way a molecular biologist cultures cells today, and those differences are not merely superficial. They reflect different goals, different institutional settings, different available materials, and different ideas about what kind of person could produce reliable knowledge. The historian of scientific practices therefore treats the workshop, the laboratory, the observatory, the hospital, the ship, and the field site as places with their own cultures, not as neutral backdrops to intellectual discovery.
A central distinction in the field is between prescriptive accounts of method and actual practice. Philosophers and scientists have often written about "the scientific method" as a single procedure of hypothesis, experiment, and verification. Historians of practice have shown that actual research rarely follows such a tidy sequence. Experiments fail and are repaired, instruments produce artifacts that are mistaken for phenomena, and results are often achieved through tacit skills that cannot be fully written down. The gap between the official story and the messy reality is itself a subject of study.
The field is organized around several enduring questions. One concerns the production of credibility: how does a particular observation, measurement, or result come to be trusted? This leads historians to examine the social arrangements that make trust possible—replication, peer review, the training of apprentices, the circulation of specimens, and the standardization of instruments. A second question concerns material culture: how do tools, instruments, and materials shape what can be known? A microscope does not simply reveal what is there; it selects, magnifies, and distorts, and the historian asks how users learned to interpret its outputs. A third question concerns skill and tacit knowledge: what aspects of scientific work cannot be captured in written instructions, and how are they transmitted from one generation to the next? This includes everything from the hand-eye coordination of a glassblower to the judgment of a field botanist about which plant specimens are "typical."
A fourth question concerns the spaces of science. Different practices are associated with different sites—the anatomical theater, the botanical garden, the museum, the industrial laboratory, the government survey, the online database. Each site imposes its own constraints and enables its own forms of work. The field also asks how practices travel: how a technique developed in one context is adapted, translated, or resisted when moved to another. Finally, there is the question of change: why do some practices persist for centuries while others are abandoned quickly? The answer is rarely that the new practice is simply "better" in an obvious sense; it usually involves institutional pressures, disciplinary politics, and the availability of new materials or instruments.
The stakes of these questions are not merely antiquarian. If knowledge is produced through practices, then understanding those practices is essential to understanding the content of science itself. The subfield challenges the view that scientific ideas can be fully understood apart from the activities that generated them. It also has implications for contemporary science policy, since debates about reproducibility, data sharing, and research ethics are debates about practices.
The history of scientific practices emerged as a distinct approach in the late twentieth century, but it drew on older traditions. In the 1930s and 1940s, the sociologist Robert K. Merton and his students studied the norms and institutional structures of science, while the Marxist historian Boris Hessen and others examined the economic and technical contexts of scientific work. These earlier efforts treated science as a social activity, but they tended to focus on institutions and ideologies rather than on the fine-grained details of laboratory work.
A more direct precursor was the "externalist" turn in the history of science during the 1960s and 1970s. Historians such as Thomas Kuhn, though best known for his theory of scientific revolutions, also emphasized the importance of training, textbooks, and "normal science" as routine problem-solving. Kuhn's account of paradigms made the everyday work of scientists—puzzle-solving within an established framework—a central object of historical attention. At the same time, the sociology of scientific knowledge, associated with scholars at the University of Edinburgh and later at the University of Bath, began to treat scientific knowledge itself as a social construction. Rather than asking why science succeeds, these sociologists asked how particular claims come to be accepted, and they examined the negotiations, controversies, and rhetorical strategies involved.
The decisive development came in the late 1970s and 1980s with the emergence of laboratory studies. Sociologists and anthropologists, most notably Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, and Karin Knorr Cetina, entered scientific laboratories as participant observers. They watched researchers at work, recorded their conversations, and examined their inscriptions—the graphs, tables, and diagrams through which laboratory events were transformed into scientific facts. These studies showed that scientific knowledge is produced through a chain of transformations: from material samples to written notes, from notes to tables, from tables to published papers. Each step involves choices, simplifications, and negotiations.
Historians of science soon adopted these insights. The historian Steven Shapin and the sociologist Simon Schaffer, in their study of Robert Boyle's air-pump experiments in the seventeenth century, showed that the credibility of experimental results depended on the social conventions of gentlemanly testimony. The historian Jan Golinski examined the role of instruments and the "making of natural knowledge" in the Scientific Revolution. The historian of chemistry Ursula Klein studied the paper tools and classification practices of eighteenth-century chemists. By the 1990s, the history of scientific practices had become a recognized subfield with its own journals, conferences, and graduate programs.
Within the subfield, several approaches coexist, each addressing different aspects of practice. They are not mutually exclusive, and many historians combine them.
One major approach focuses on the material world of science: instruments, specimens, buildings, and the physical manipulations of nature. This approach asks how instruments shape perception and what counts as evidence. A key concept is inscription: the transformation of material processes into written or graphical traces. A thermometer converts temperature into a column of mercury; a galvanometer converts electric current into a needle deflection; a mass spectrometer converts chemical composition into a spectrum. The historian examines how these inscriptions are produced, how they are read, and how they become accepted as representations of nature.
This approach also studies the circulation of material objects. Specimens collected in the colonies were shipped to European museums, where they were classified and displayed. The historian asks what was lost and gained in this process: a plant torn from its ecological context, dried, pressed, and mounted becomes a different kind of object. Similarly, the standardization of instruments—the effort to make a thermometer in Paris read the same as one in London—involves a complex social and technical process. The material approach has been particularly influential in the history of early modern science, where the emergence of new instruments (telescope, microscope, air-pump, barometer) was central to the Scientific Revolution.
A limitation of this approach is that it can become purely descriptive, cataloguing instruments and techniques without explaining their significance. The most successful work in this vein connects material practices to broader intellectual and social changes.
A second approach treats scientific practices as social activities through which knowledge is negotiated. Drawing on the sociology of scientific knowledge, this approach examines controversies, the closure of debates, and the rhetorical strategies scientists use to persuade audiences. It treats facts not as discoveries but as achievements: the outcome of successful work in aligning interests, mobilizing resources, and enrolling allies.
The most influential version is actor-network theory, associated with Latour and Michel Callon. This approach refuses to distinguish between human and non-human actors: a microscope, a bacterium, a funding agency, and a scientist are all "actants" in a network. Scientific knowledge is the result of building networks that are strong enough to resist challenge. A fact is a statement that no one disputes, not because it is true in some absolute sense but because the network supporting it is robust.
This approach has been criticized for its relativism and for its tendency to treat all knowledge claims symmetrically, regardless of their apparent validity. Its defenders respond that symmetry is a methodological principle, not a philosophical position: the historian should explain why a claim is accepted or rejected without assuming in advance which outcome was correct. The approach has been most productive in studying contemporary science and recent history, where the historian can examine controversies in detail.
A third approach emphasizes the embodied and tacit dimensions of scientific work. The philosopher Michael Polanyi coined the term "tacit knowledge" to describe what we know but cannot fully articulate—like the ability to ride a bicycle or recognize a face. Historians of practice have applied this concept to science, showing that many scientific skills are learned through imitation, practice, and apprenticeship rather than through reading instructions.
This approach examines the training of scientists: how students learn to dissect, to culture cells, to read X-ray images, to judge the quality of a crystal. It also examines the role of the senses in science. Before the twentieth century, many scientists relied on taste, smell, and touch as well as sight. Chemists tasted their products; geologists licked rocks to identify minerals; physicians listened to bodies with their bare ears before the stethoscope. The history of the senses in science is a growing area within this approach.
A related concern is the standardization of bodies. To produce reliable measurements, scientists must discipline their own bodies and those of their subjects. The history of psychological testing, for example, involves the standardization of the tester as much as the test. The approach has been criticized for romanticizing craft skill and for underestimating the role of explicit theory, but it has drawn attention to aspects of science that are otherwise invisible.
A fourth approach focuses on the written and graphical products of scientific work: notebooks, tables, maps, diagrams, and publications. This approach examines how scientists use paper to organize their thoughts, to record observations, and to communicate results. It treats writing not as a transparent medium but as a practice with its own conventions and constraints.
A key concept is the paper tool: a written or printed device that enables new kinds of reasoning. The periodic table, for example, is a paper tool that organizes chemical elements and predicts their properties. The geological map is a paper tool that compresses three-dimensional structures into two dimensions. The graph is a paper tool that makes patterns visible in numerical data. Historians in this vein examine how these tools are invented, how they are used, and how they shape the knowledge they represent.
This approach also studies the literary technologies of science: the rhetorical conventions of scientific papers, the use of illustrations, the construction of "objective" prose. Shapin and Schaffer showed that Boyle's experimental reports were carefully written to convey the impression of eyewitness testimony, even when the reader was not present. The approach has been particularly influential in the history of early modern science, where the rise of printed books and journals transformed the communication of knowledge.
These approaches are not rival schools in the sense of mutually exclusive paradigms. They overlap and borrow from each other. The material approach and the paper approach both examine inscriptions, though from different angles. The sociological approach often uses the material approach's concepts of instruments and networks. The skill approach complements the paper approach by emphasizing what cannot be written down.
There are, however, genuine tensions. The sociological approach tends to treat scientific knowledge as socially constructed, while the material approach sometimes implies that nature itself constrains what can be known. The skill approach emphasizes individual craft, while the sociological approach emphasizes collective negotiation. These tensions are productive: they reflect different answers to the question of where scientific knowledge comes from.
The field has also seen a shift from the study of production to the study of circulation. Early work focused on how facts are made in the laboratory. More recent work examines how facts travel: how they are translated, adapted, and sometimes rejected when they move across national, disciplinary, or institutional boundaries. This shift has been influenced by postcolonial studies, which ask how scientific practices were imposed, adopted, or transformed in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
The history of scientific practices is now a mature subfield with established positions in major universities, dedicated journals, and a steady stream of monographs. It has expanded from its early focus on early modern Europe and contemporary laboratories to cover a wide range of periods, regions, and disciplines. Historians study the practices of alchemists, apothecaries, surveyors, engineers, physicians, and field naturalists, as well as those of academic scientists.
Several trends characterize the present landscape. One is the global turn: historians increasingly study scientific practices outside Europe and North America, examining how knowledge was made in colonial settings, in non-Western traditions, and in transnational networks. This work has complicated the older narrative of science as a European invention that spread outward. It shows, for example, that European naturalists depended on indigenous collectors, guides, and informants, and that local knowledge often shaped European classifications.
Another trend is the digital turn. Historians now study the practices of contemporary digital science: the use of databases, algorithms, and computational models. They also use digital methods themselves, such as text mining and network analysis, to study historical sources. This has raised new questions about the materiality of digital data and the practices of data curation.
A third trend is the integration of science and technology studies. The history of scientific practices has become closely intertwined with the sociology of science, the philosophy of experiment, and the anthropology of knowledge. Many practitioners identify with the broader field of science and technology studies (STS) rather than with the history of science narrowly conceived. This has brought new methods and questions but has also created tensions with more traditional historians who emphasize intellectual context and narrative.
The subfield's greatest contribution has been to make the mundane work of science visible. Before its emergence, the history of science was largely a history of ideas: theories, discoveries, and great minds. The history of scientific practices has shown that the production of knowledge is also a history of hands, tools, materials, and routines. It has made it impossible to tell the story of science without asking how, exactly, the work was done.