Can’t say I agree with the idea, but it’s certainly interesting to consider and at the least should help strengthen or discard a few assumptions!

I think he’s conflating the process with all the other human factors involved. Sure, Galileo maybe did some shady stuff to convince people of his arguments. But that in no way makes a telescope stop working the way it does.

If you want to go down a rabbit hole, Nonlinear dynamics is another way to understand science. Many systems operate from a different paradigm of causality; it happens in biology, also common in fields like weather prediction where a large dataset is analyzed for patterns and then hypotheses are driven off the data in the opposite direction.

This has caused some controversy in the scientific community because researchers have been caught using the methodology to "reverse engineer" hypotheses without disclosure, effectively gaming the system.