Leonelli and Trappes propose the research environment as a systematic object for philosophy of science. Scientific inquiry is situated within intertwined conceptual, material and social conditions: skills, background knowledge, instruments, samples, institutional structures, norms, collaboration, administrative arrangements and physical settings all participate in shaping what can be known. The theoretical contribution is to move beyond accounts of scientific change centred principally on concepts, theories or disciplines and to examine the environments within which research practices become possible. Their conceptual operation draws cautiously on ecological and organism–environment thinking while refusing a simplistic biological metaphor for social science. This opens research environments to analysis as distributed structures of agency, division of labour, situated knowledge and material constraint. The wider bridge is to social epistemology, feminist epistemology and infrastructure studies: disciplines cease to be sufficient explanatory containers once the concrete environments of knowledge production are recognised as active determinants of scientific content and change.
