Within historical, philosophical, and social studies of scientific practices, the notion of 'resistance' has been used in a variety of ways. Differences aside, discussion of resistance tends to be used when emphaissing that “Scientists cannot fully control or foresee the outcomes of their conceptual and experimental practice, and time alters both their intentions and their performances” (Holmes 2004. 7) For example, [Ludwik Fleck](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fleck/) (1979, pp. 38–41) argued that the knowing subject must engage with the resistances from both the object to be known and the existing fund of knowledge within the community in question. Likewise, Joseph Rouse’s (1996, pp. 134–135) fourth and fifth theses about scientific practices include the notion of resistance: “(4) practices are therefore sustained only against resistance and difference and always engage relations of power; (5) the constitute role of resistance and difference is a further reason why the identity of a practice is never entirely fixed by its history and thus why its constitutive pattern cannot be conclusively fixed by a rule (practices are open to continual reinterpretation and semantic drift).” A complementary yet independently developed notion of resistance can be found in Andrew Pickering’s (1995a) account of how the materiality of instruments can resist human intention in the sense that the unpredictable responses of the material artefacts can reduce the ease with which humans can attain the outcome they intended when using the instrument in question. This notion of resistance can be understood from the notion in electrical engineering of resistance as a measure of how a material substance can reduce the flow of an electric current in one direction. However, the term ‘resistance’ has been used in other ways; and other approaches that intersect with the above use of resistance have been explored with different terminology. For an example of the former, see Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (2009, 2011) for a view that emphasises how notions of resistance are not just articulating the obstacles materiality presents to human goals, but also highlight how unexpected aspects of materiality can divert the attention of a researcher away from their initial goal (even momentarily and potentially unfruitfully) without necessarily obstructing the pursuit of the initial goal per se. For an example of the later, it is worth considering the similarities and differences in the notions of ‘resistance’ and ‘constraints’ (Galison 1995, p. 27, note 7; Pickering 1995a, pp. 65–67, 1995b, p. 43, note 1; Vertesi 2015, note 3 in Chapter 7). List of References: * Fleck, L. 1979. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Translated by T Trenn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. * Galison, Peter L. 1995. ‘Context and Constraints’. In Scientific Practice: Theories and Stories of Doing Physics, edited by Jed Z. Buchwald, 13–41. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. * Holmes, Frederic Lawrence. 2004. Investigative Pathways: Patterns and Stages in the Careers of Experimental Scientists. Yale University Press. * Pickering, Andrew. 1995a. ‘Beyond Constraint: The Temporality of Practice and the Historicity of Knowledge’. In Scientific Practice: Theories and Stories of Doing Physics, edited by Jed Z. Buchwald, 42–55. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. * Pickering. 1995b. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. * Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2009. ‘On the Historicity of Scientific Knowledge: Ludwick Fleck, Gaston Bachelard, Edmund Husserl’. In Science and the Life-World: Essays on Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences, edited by David Jalal Hyder and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. * Rheinberger. 2011. ‘Consistency from the Perspective of an Experimental Systems Approach to the Sciences and Their Epistemic Object’. Edited by Evandro Agazzi, Itala D’Ottaviano, and Daniele Mundici. Manuscrito - Revista Internacional de Filosofia, Science, Truth and Consistency: A Festschrift for Newton da Costa - Proceedings of the CLE/AIPS Event 200, Campinas, 34 (1): 307–21. * Rouse, Joseph. 1996. Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically. Cornell: Cornell University Press. * Vertesi, Janet. 2015. Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars. University of Chicago Press.