Going back to the Martin Fleischmann interview, from IE (linked by Gregory Byron Goble )
QuoteMF: I think there was a very unfortunate development in the 70's, a sort of "anti-Francis Bacon development." People developed a view that a subject is not respectable unless it is dressed up with a suitable overload of theory, and consequently we have had this "top dressing" of theory put on the subject which has tended to make the approach very rigid. Also, the theories are of course written in terms of rather old-fashioned ideas.
Fleischmann's reference to Francis Bacon is very important here. Bacon's publication of the Novum Organum in 1620 was a landmark in philosophical and scientific thought. In it he criticised the Aristotelian method of Deduction that was regarded as the proper way to enhance knowledge at the time. Aristotle had basically said that by thinking deeply enough, and by making various assumptions, which appeared logically correct to a skilled philosophical thinker, it would be possible to reveal truths about the natural world. Francis Bacon insisted that the only way to gain information about the natural world was through direct observation, and by testing any ideas that are prompted by those observations by carrying out actual physical experiments. The Baconian method formed the original basis for what later became known as the scientific method.
Francis Bacon was well aware that human nature would drift towards the internally Deductive, rather than the externally Inductive, and that a formal method was needed to counter that drift. He wasn't against deduction in its proper place, and was aware that it was central to areas such as mathematics and theology, but he knew that natural phenomena needed to be treated differently.
Now read this piece, published only last week, in the Guardian - written by Sabine Hossenfelder:
Basically, the "natural drift" has reoccurred - and some areas of science have reverted back to Aristotelian Deduction.