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An observation of David Mermin's provides us with the occasion to clarify a little more the idea of “epistemography.” Mermin writes: “Peter Dear's remark that ‘modern scientific beliefs are in fact irrelevant to an epistemographical account’ can be too limiting when those beliefs can give clues about the objective circumstances of historic events.” There is, among other things, an important point about theory and practice here. As regards the practice of the historian of science, there is no doubt that knowledge of present-day scientific ideas often comes in very handy in wrestling with the (sometimes very alien) beliefs of the past—the more so the more recent the historical episode. That usefulness is, however, fundamentally heuristic. In orienting oneself with respect to a historical episode, it can happen that a more modern idea can cast an otherwise perhaps unexpected light on the material under investigation.

This chapter proposes ‘epistemography’ as a methodology for investigating and writing about technical and scientific objects and systems of expertise of relevance in contemporary and past societies. I use the presentation of the four methodological principles establishing the appropriate conduct of a sociological, anthropological and historical epistemography to introduce the features of the book. The four principles of conduct of an epistemography are: ‘situated impartiality’; ‘knowledge as collective practices’; ‘formation stories’; and ‘meta-epistemography’. This book is an epistemography of climate change, which means that it holds no preconceptions of what ‘climate knowledge’ is nor any ambition to resolve disputes about the reality of climate change; instead, it seeks to explain a set of climate knowledge-making practices and the formation of an epistemic object representing the evolution of climate in Scotland. To do so, I explored the scientific community in question from the inside, unafraid to get involved in their working lives and to help them with their credibility struggles. This book also makes epistemographic knowledge amenable to empirical analysis in fundamentally the same way as any other form of expertise, and offers a meta-analysis of the making of this book.

The ambiguities of the catch-all label “science studies” are not accidental: such crypto-disciplinary names tend to be hobbled from the start by the need to draw in as many constituencies as possible, thereby running the risk of yoking together quite distinct intellectual endeavors. If (no doubt, contestably) we date science studies from the later 1970s, we immediately perceive a genealogy. Before science studies, there was a fairly well-established specialty called the history and philosophy of science. There was also a subfield of sociology known as the sociology of science. Science studies has now swallowed up large amounts of what once fell into those earlier categories, without always thoroughly digesting them. But the parts that were left behind tell their own stories.