The lived perspective entails assessing learners’ NOS conceptions from practice, that is, while students are engaged in doing science (Kelly et al. 1998 ) . Irrespective of the form that such an assessment would take, it will involve an inference to beliefs from actions. This approach is apt to be problematic. As noted above, prac- ticing scientists do not necessarily do science in accordance with an articulated epistemological framework; such a framework is rarely explicated in scientific apprenticeships. While scientists’ actions might be consistent with an epistemologi- cal framework underlying the disciplinary tradition into which they were initiated, these actions might not tell much about a particular scientist’s underlying epistemo- logical beliefs. For example, a friend of mine is a computational chemist heavily engaged in university-based pharmaceutical research in which she builds virtual macro-molecules and investigates their stability and interactional properties with certain parts of virtual receptors on cellular surfaces. She is also a devout Christian. In a casual conversation, she indicated that taking communion from the same utensil during Sunday mass cannot result in the spread of orally-transmitted viruses among worshipers because God would not allow such a thing to happen to those engaged in such a holly deed. This is an example of a scientist who believes in supernatural intervention in the course of an established and well understood natural phenome- non, that is, the spread of infectious agents. Many of us can reproduce similar exam- ples in which some scientist’s beliefs are not consistent with their daily scientific practice and associated worldview.