From my daily experience as a scientist in a STEM field, it seems to me more and more that doing science is more motivated by spreading a plausible episteme (in a broader sense than Foucault maybe) rather than producing results. Some research groups produce a lot of pragmatic solutions and might not care about the underlying explanations. Others are deeply theoretical and might produce only a book-length paper every couple of years. Yet others might work with industry or even try to avoid any practicability/usefulness.

In doing science, it feels often that I want to spread my own mode of how to go about a problem. I want to make an argument, that doing science my way, is a good one (with respect to some epistemological criteria, which also belong into my episteme). So, of course it is a bit circular, because I argue for my epistemology with epistemological criteria. But this is usually obfuscated and people do it regardless, or there is sometimes a certain consensus, what might pass as meta-epistemological criteria (so much for value-free science).