One of the most persistent commonsense accounts of science is that in which scientists are understood to assemble observations systematically and to arrive at reliable generalizations based on them. Sometimes, wrongly, this simple inductive-empiricist view is laid at the door of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and dubbed “Baconian inductivism.” In fact, Bacon's views were considerably more complex than this, but the hare that he set running – inductive inference as the heart of scientific method – has subsequently been pursued by all manner of hounds. The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) was pre-eminent among the early pursuers, and to this day “Hume's problem” continues to preoccupy the philosophy of science. In the mid-twentieth century, there was a period when the seemingly more powerful hypothetico-deductive model of scientific inquiry appeared to have run inductivism and Hume's problem to exhaustion. However, it rapidly became apparent that the issues surrounding inductive inference had a peculiar capacity to re-emerge from the coverts of deductive certainty, not least where the nature of observation itself was questioned. Into the space thus created have hastened newer, more relativistic epistemologies and, in full cry, the sociology of science.