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Unless you can rephrase your argument as something testable, it's philosophy and thereby not relevant.
The claim I just made - that dismissing philosophy on empirical grounds is self-refuting because it relies on the philosophical position of empiricism - is not “dismissible by science” - there is no experiment or observation capable of proving or disproving that claim.
Also, the assumption you seem to be making - that all genuine knowledge comes from empirical science - can be countered with the argument that mathematical theorems (e.g. those of Gödel) are true and can he known to be true, but they are not known or knowable by means of empirical science
> Unless you can rephrase your argument as something testable, it's philosophy and thereby not relevant.
What you just said is not testable, hence by its own terms is philosophy and thereby not relevant - it condemns itself as irrelevant
There are still a few philosophers who will try to raise logical positivism from the dead – but even they'll all acknowledge that in its classic formulation it doesn't work, so any attempt to do so will require significant revisions.
Philosophers may never agree on who is right, but sometimes they can reach a consensus on who is wrong.
Science itself is the product of philosophical enquiry.
Just like the Internet is the work of Al Gore, if you ask Al Gore.
Al Gore’s relationship to the Internet can’t be compared
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.
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.
Most of the life and the world involves beliefs that aren't testable. The lack of testability doesn't mean it's arbitrary; testing is just one tool (the most effective one, I believe). But if you restricted yourself to that, if we had no other qualification or judgment, we couldn't achieve anything.
However we now have at least the basics to hypothesize and perform experiments. So it's no longer philosophy and is in the realm of understanding what actually are the mechanisms of consciousness.
Is science “reality” or is it just a series of models/ conceptual frameworks ?
At some point you have to stop thinking in your head why you can't walk through the window and start testing and figuring out what keeps breaking your nose.
Translation: I’ve never read Aristotle.
Where do you get the 'hypothesis'?
That is where philosophy comes in, it is pre-testing, thinking of the things to test.
(also, note. by your definition, string theory is an 'opinion', not science).