I don't think the two have to be so divorced as you suggest. :-)
Science is not perfect, but it provides evaluation mechanisms to reduce the doubt.
I'm not sure what you are including in "philosophy," but there are entire subfields dedicated to this very issue.
However, unlike the sciences, you have to work for it. Nature doesn't give you the answers.
But I guess science-denying people argue just like I did above when they dislike the idea that science admits that it may be wrong and will update itself with new evidence. But I can see how someone with a different epistemological footing would be annoyed with this.
Something of this sort can never be "wrong", because it will just incorporate an update when it's proven wrong. But is that updated thing really the same?
It's a cheap trick to try and get around of being ever truly wrong. If you turn out to be wrong you can just say "but I knew I may be wrong and would have to update" so you weren't really wrong in the deeper sense!
Note that I adhere to this scientific ethos as well, but I can see it has a wobbly structure in this way.
But even today a lot of engineering, biology and medicine is extremely empirical.
I mean philosophical medicine led people to derive that we need to do bloodletting etc. While I guess less educated common village folk or indigenous jungle inhabitants had various practices that helped but they didn't know why and weren't derived from ideas like the humors and four elements.
I'm just arguing against a sort of waterfall model of philosophers sitting on top of the totem pole and passing down to us what to do. Perhaps that's a straw man though, but some people do seem to think that before Aristotle gave us logic we couldn't follow complex arguments. Indeed, I think it's rather that they formalized already existing argument structures they observed in the agora etc. For sure the abstract tools also turned out to be useful and abstraction is how we got to the moon, not through taller ladders etc.
I think it's hard to deny there is a bitter elitist tinge to philosophers that they don't get enough credit, but it's definitely a larger topic than what fits in a comment.
What came first, empirical physicists or the recognition that mundane events could be predicted and controlled in a useful way?
What came first, meteorologists or the recognition that paying heed to mundane weather patterns could be useful?
In essence, yes, you're arguing against a strawman. Every improvement is incremental. How come you're belittling Aristotle and Plato and discarding their contributions, but not similarly discarding Newton, Leibniz or Turing?