Descartes' concept of science can be understood only by paying careful attention to the historical context in which it was constructed. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century involved two related developments: a change in scientific practice (or, more accurately, a whole series of such changes) which is reflected in the founding of new scientific societies such as the Royal Society and the Academie royale des sciences, and a complementary change in how natural philosophers described the kind of knowledge that resulted from the new scientific practices. Descartes contributed to both developments. He shared this distinction with such eminent figures as Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Christian Huygens, and Isaac Newton, all of whom were concerned both with improving our knowledge of nature and with clarifying the status of that knowledge.

It would be an obvious oversimplification to classify all the natural philosophers of the seventeenth century as, in some fundamental sense, proposing the same scientific theories. It is equally unsatisfactory to suggest that they all accepted the same theory of science or the same model of scientific knowledge.