[pertinhower]

Here's an example of where the philosophy helps. You would probably agree that physics is a clear science and that its methods—philosophically reasoned about—produce (or discover) genuine truth. But would you agree that a "softer" science—say, psychology—still has enough methodological rigor to produce genuine truth? How about sociology? Economics? The more observationally ambiguous—the more abstract, profoundly complex, or "fuzzy" a science's subject is—the less confident we are that it's really a science, that it really produces truth. So how do you reason about what sciences or individual experiments are productive and which are flawed, uncertain or, frankly, bogus? Philosophy!