The difference is that what we now call “science” actually did start out as a branch of philosophy, and only gradually became separated from it; and there are figures who made substantial contributions to both disciplines (e.g. Henri Poincaré, who made significant contributions to both mathematical physics and philosophy of science)
Al Gore’s relationship to the Internet can’t be compared
> The difference is that what we now call “science” actually did start out as a branch of philosophy, and only gradually became separated from it;
It was hundreds of years ago, when philosophers of nature, aka people who thought about usefull stuff, left to become scientists. What remains in philosophy since then is all the useless stuff.
There are practising scientists who take philosophy of science much more seriously than you do.
To give a random example, I'm quite a fan of Lynn Waterhouse's Rethinking Autism: Variation and Complexity (Elsevier Academic Press, 2013) which seeks to provide a critical evaluation of the strength of the scientific evidence behind the theory of autism, in its various incarnations (from Kanner's early infantile autism and Asperger's autistic psychopathy through to DSM-5 ASD). And Waterhouse actually draws on philosophy of science in the process, as this quote demonstrates (p. 24):
> In fact, the orphaned and disconfirmed theories that have failed to explain variation in autism are, in large part, examples of theory underdetermination. Science philosopher Peter Lipton (2005) argued, “Theories go far beyond the data that support them; indeed, the theories would be of little interest if this were not so. However, this means a scientific theory is always ‘underdetermined’ by the available data concerning the phenomena” (p. 1261). The theory of underdetermination, called the Duhem–Quine principle, is a formal acceptance that theories make claims that data do not fully support. Theory succession, as from Hippocrates’ theory of pangenesis to Darwin’s gemmules, to DNA and transcriptomes, moves from one underdetermined theory to the next. However, Stanford (2001) pointed out that not all theory underdetermination is acceptable. It can be a Devil’s bargain: a serious threat to scientific discovery.
And another quote from the same book (p. 27):
> Equally problematic, autism brain research findings have not uncovered the underlying complexity of the phenomena. Bogen and Woodward (1988) argued that what can be measured is “rarely the result of a single phenomenon operating alone, but instead typically reflect the interaction of many different phenomena ….Nature is so complicated that … it is hard to imagine an instrument which could register any phenomenon of interest in isolation” (pp. 351–352).
And the citations referenced in those quotes:
> Lipton, P. (2005). The Medawar Lecture 2004: The truth about science. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B, 360, 1259–1269
> Stanford, P.K. (2001). Refusing the devil’s bargain: What kind of underdetermination should we take seriously? Philosophy of Science, 68, 3. Supplement: Proceedings of the 2000 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers, pp. S1–S12
> Bogen, J., & Woodward, J. (1988). Saving the phenomena. Philosophical Review, 97, 303–352.
The book only cites three philosophy of science papers, compared to dozens and dozens of papers from neuroscience, genetics, psychology, etc – as you'd expect for a scholarly book focused on the science of autism. Still, the fact it cites philosophy papers at all is an example of how many practising scientists are more positive about philosophy of science than you yourself are.
Just like the Internet is the work of Al Gore, if you ask Al Gore.