What a great discussion. Without-music, I would like to respond to this question. I hope I will not disturb the careful logic your discourse.
phyllo, when we use the phrase “gathering data” there is already a bias, a perspective taken for granted. The assumption is that the data-gathering is an objective procedure. But scientists know this to be untrue; All scientific data is gathered with a certain intention. Otherwise it is not useful data. Intention is subjective, the subject is biased. The bias determines what is useful - and the word useful here suggests the question “useful to what?” Well, to progress of course. “Progress of what?” Of knowledge! “Of which knowledge?” Of the type to which this data is pertinent!" There is no way out of this loop, science is self-evident to itself. Philosophy has an entirely different angle, a different bias - it can look at science as a mere technique without any relation to meaning, reality or truth.
When one wants to study the behavior of nylon molecules under high tension, one does not wander into the supermarket, aimlessly gather some random items, and wander out to look what may be applicable to the status quo on the laboratory-table. This would be relatively unbiased data-gathering. On the other hand, to collect different items made out of nylon and to start stretching these items is extremely biased. It makes sense, but it is about as far from objectively real as possible. It makes sense precisely because it is through and through subjective, a an aspect of reality intentionally isolated, that such seemingly “hard facts” as science works with can come to be known, so that we can know the answer to the question does x equal y or not? Such questions are the root-substance of science, and the idea that in such questioning (is this that?) reality is addressed, is the scientific bias.
What does this bias produce? Electricity, engines, processors, a lot of useful things. But - useful to what? Here we fail to produce a scientific answer. We fail to do so because we are not even aware that such an answer could be asked scientifically. We are unaware of this because we think that science is unbiased, that it registers the objective truth. We think that our discoveries are simply results of the successful effort to understand the workings of the universe. But they depend solely on our bias of what is valuable, what is considered as “workings” - results of what it is that can be asked, and of in what way things can be asked.
Science operates from well-calculated bias - it knows what it wants to find out, it knows the context in which it is possible to find such out, and it knows how to create that context and how to isolate it from other intrusive elements of reality that do not support the context. In doing so, it determines how we view the world.
Incidentally, science has since a century discovered that its basic tenets, the either/or way of questioning, result in a problem. But the root of the problem has not been identified yet as the method of questioning. The contradictions of quantum-mechanics were implicit in scientific method all along, the questioning finally running into it’s own proposed limits, unable to understand beyond it, even though it perceives that something real does lie beyond it. It cannot however be accepted as real because it doesn’t fit the terms. There is no evil will involved, just a mind trapped inside its metaphysical circuitry, its language.
The coming decades could be very rewarding times for philosophy, as philosophers are the only ones who understand that all knowledge relies on grammar, especially in science, where grammar is called algebra.