What is the history of science the history of? Early modern roots of the ideology of modern science

The mismatch between common representations of "science" and the miscellany of materials typically studied by the historian of science is traced to a systematic ambiguity that may itself be traced to early modem Europe. In that cultural setting, natural philosophy came to be rearticulated (most famously by Francis Bacon) as involving both contemplative and practical knowledge. The resulting tension and ambiguity are illustrated by the eighteenth-century views of Buffon. In the nineteenth century, a new enterprise called "science" represents the establishment of an unstable ideology of natural knowledge that was heavily indebted to those early modem developments. The two complementary and competing elements of the ideology of modem science are accordingly described as "natural philosophy" (a discourse of contemplative knowledge) and "instrumentality" (a discourse of practical or useful knowledge; know-how). The history of science in large part concerns the story of their shifting, often mutually denying, interrelations.