The paper addresses the nature of science ‘as a whole’, i.e. it intends to present a
functional and interpretive characterisation of the scientific enterprise (cf. Allchin
2011), as opposed to a series of separate features contained in a list of ‘NOS tenets’.
The view on NOS presented here draws mainly on contributions from two recent
trends of philosophy of science (from the 1970 to 1990s): the post-Kuhnian
philosophy of science and the semanticist family.