Thirty years ago, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard argued that science, lacking the resources to legitimate itself as true, had come to rely for its legitimacy on precisely the kind of knowledge it did not even consider to be knowledge: namely, non-scientific narrative knowledge. Specifically, it was philosophy’s role to produce a discourse of legitimation for science in the form of narratives such as those of the Enlightenment, progress, modernity and the creation of wealth. Lyotard’s intention was not to position philosophy as ultimately being able to tell us more about science than science itself, but to emphasize that, in a process of transformation which had been taking place since at least the end of the 1950s, such long-standing metanarratives had become obsolete.