The circularity is in your wording, not in the thing itself. A scientist has an idea, one expressed clearly enough that two or more similarly trained individuals can understand the claim. The idea is tested against reality, in a way (again) that similarly equipped observers can agree that the result means what it seems to mean.
The outcome is either that the original idea is supported by, or falsified by, the comparison to reality. And the distinction between the idea, and its test against reality, is nowhere confused -- not among scientists, anyway.
> The philosophers who engage in questioning the "real" are not doing it for the reasons scientists engage in discovering "correct" phenomena.
That's for sure -- philosophers much prefer arguing about the meaning of reality, to dealing with reality on its own terms. Many modern philosophers, following this trend, slide into deconstructive postmodernism without ever realizing that they've crossed the threshold of absurdity (by posing the argument that all experience is subjective and there is no objective reality as scientists claim, but without realizing that their argument justly applies first to the words they've just uttered).