After clarifying the difference made by adding sociological to philosophical naturalization, one finds another dichotomy that has marked philosophy of science since its beginning, namely, the dichotomy between the context of discovery and the context of justification. Indeed, philosophy began to see the scientific enterprise as divided into two very different kinds of activities: that of discovering and that of evaluating scientific results. Only this latter was thought to be philosophically relevant; the processes that really give rise to scientific results appeared as irrelevant to the justification of these results. This distinction turned out to function, as a matter of fact, as a veto against the investigation of real scientific processes. With philosophical naturalization there were changes: the investigation of real, historical, actual episodes of science are now thought to be not only relevant, but almost necessary conditions of what is considered to be good metascientific practice. Yet this philosophical change has had little effect on the dichotomy of contexts, because investigations now empirical of change and evaluation continue to be the major philosophical topic.

Sociological naturalization reverses the order of relevance; the key metascientific problems arise around the processes of knowledge making, before the crystalization of the results. Indeed, for SSK, what is more interesting and relevant is to analyze what scientists really do when they practice the activity called science: when they produce laboratory phenomena, as well as when they produce scientific literature; when they intervene in a controversy, as well as when they decide on closure; when they relate claims about nature with claims about society, as well as when they relate claims about society with claims about nature. SSK claims, thus, that the most interesting and relevant place to look in order to know the nature of science is to the real practice of science. Without it no scientific results would exist.

This reversal of the order of priority, from finished products to their production processes, is quite important because, according to SSK, once scientific results laboratory facts, controversy closures, scientific papers are delivered, they are all that we know where "we" includes not only lay-people but most scientists. The processes, agents, and resources that brought them about become, in this way, invisible. Scientific results become black boxes that have a life of their own. Here is a reason for the fruitfulness of focusing on production processes. But there is another still more important reason. It has to do with the fact that, according to SSK, this invisibility is the reason why one has traditionally seen scientific results as emanating directly from nature, as having to do with nothing but nature, reality, the world such as it is in itself, independently of human action, intention, interests, and desires. This is the prevalent view of scientific results, and it is so generally shared that it is taken for granted. It is precisely for this reason that this view must be critiqued by analyzing in detail each and every one of the factors, actions, and resources that make science possible in the first place. For these reasons, one should give priority to science in action rather than to the results of its actions.