Philosophers of science have long neglected applied science as one of the proper objects of their study. This neglect is an unrecognized legacy of positivism and its preoccupation with scientific theory. The rationalists and historicists among philosophers of science of the last twenty-five years recognize other disadvantages of this preoccupation with theory. But because they exclude engineering and applied science from consideration, they fail to see the power of pragmatism to transform the issues of their own debates. Hacking makes all (...) these points in his book, as he argues for a scientific realism discovered through understanding the activity of experimentalists in science. (shrink)