Do you still hold that scientific thought is NOT a philosophy?
Science is a methodology. It makes no claims to producing any final truth. It does, however have the capacity to debunk fraud and error in claims about the way things work.
It does produce statements about the world that are more reliable than armchair philosophy, even if limited in scope.
Individual scientists can be armchair philosophers and say anything they want. they can be wrong in that same way and for the same reasons that non-scientists can be wrong.
But within the scope of observable phenomena, science produces better and more reliable statements than any previous method.