>>527>into a pointless discuss about useless speculative 'knowledge'No this is not about speculative knowledge, this is about the philosophy of science. And that has practical implications.
You have a range of interpretations of the measured facts of reality. The range goes from hard-materialist to fully idealist. The materialist side considers science as an unfinished process where lots of stuff is still missing and lots of paradigms might have to be overthrown. While the idealist side doesn't want any new additions anymore and just complete the current level and then stop.
The ancient greek atomists offered the earliest recorded materialist philosophy of science, and they invented the concept of the atom (the smallest most fundamental indivisible unit of matter). When people went looking for the atom they found out lots of new science and that remade our scientific understanding of the world and of course depreciated lots of old theory. The idealists tried for centuries to get rid of the idea of the atom, they even tried to burn all the texts from ancient greek atomists like Epicurus. Today something similar at lesser intensity might be happening with the DebroglieBohm or pilotwave interpretation of QM. They are trying to get rid of the "corpuscle" which is the physical particle that is guided by the quantum wave. If people went looking for that it could once again lead to lots of new and unexpected things.