Careful reflection on philosophical ideas is rare. Worse still ,
publicly indulging an interest in philosophy of science is often treated
as social blunder.
Skwinty, I get the feeling that you're posting from a vacuum in which you're not talking to either physicists or philosophers. Some of your premises are false.
Physicists talk philosophy all the time---I've had a number of discussions with colleagues about foundations of quantum mechanics, in particular. (Many-worlds versus Copenhagen versus there-must-be-something-we've-missed; there's no "social blunder" in these discussions at all.) In the wake of the "Intelligent Design" nonsense, I've been in serious amateur discussions of the nature of scientific inquiry, about Kuhn and Popper, etc. The current state of string theory, cosmology, and the LHC has sparked serious discussions about "naturalness" and beauty in physics; about the anthropic principle; about fundamental and practical limits to human knowledge. In other words: yes, we discuss philosophy, and very seriously.
At the same time: no, for the most part we haven't read Kant. Why not? Because, to a large extent,
reading Kant doesn't help. There are two reasons for this; first,
many of Kant's basic ideas have been sort of "mainstreamed"---unless you were an undergrad at St. John's or U. Chicago on an explicitly Great Books curriculum, you'll have picked up the difference between "a priori" and "a posteriori" without having read a word of primary-source epistemology. This is no different than, e.g., knowing quantum mechanics without having read Schrodinger's old papers, or knowing your way around modern economics without having read "Wealth of Nations". Secondly, a lot of classical philosophy turns out to have been
interesting detours towards dead ends. I'm sure Kant had a lot of great hopes for what we would be able to learn "once we've cleared up this analytic/synthetic problem", and Hegel surely thought that his successors would stand on the shoulders of dialectics and move on to better things ... but that really hasn't happened. The stuff that got "mainstreamed" was the best stuff, and some of the rest turns out to have been word-games and confusion.
As a matter of curriculum, please note that no physics program-of-study requires "History of Science" coursework, yet we all tend to know quite a bit of such history.
Next, you seem to be confused about the
capabilities of philosophy of science. Philosophy has never, not once, served to tell scientists where to look. It hasn't served to distinguish a true theory from a false theory (except insofar as "the scientific method" has encoded some things which might be called epistimology---but these methods were developed as
practices by working scientists, then described by philosophers.) Einstein's 1905 work was basically that a particular change-of-variables simultaneously simplified Maxwell's Equations and made the speed of light emitter- and observer-independent. In response, philosophers said, "ooh, what is time, really?" Schrodinger struggled to find an equation which reproduced both free-electron motion and hydrogen and helium spectra. Afterwards, philosophers said, "ooh, what's really underlying matter, measurement, and consciousness?" And so on. Physics/data/math/theory first, philosophy second. At no point did
philosophers of science stand up and say, "Whoa, old chaps, this Aether business is really untenable from a Humean point of view", whereupon scientists said, "you're right, time for a paradigm shift." Skwinty, your position seems to be (a) philosophy is good, therefore (b) science + philosophy must better than science alone, therefore (c) when science appears to be in alone and trouble (that's what you hear, anyway) so clearly it needs philosophy to help. That sounds nice on paper, in the abstract, but historically speaking it has no basis whatsoever.
One argument you could make: you could argue that the "EPR paradox" is so well-studied, in part, by physicists trying to clear up a
philosophical objection to quantum mechanics. But you will by no means win this argument; Einstein's reasoning, which was basically, "Hang on, if your equation X is correct it predicts Y, and Y sounds unbelieveable", is entirely within the normal, modern thought process of physicists; it's something we do every day (I'd call these thought-experiments "sanity checks") and would identify as "science" rather than "philosophy." Other than EPR I can think of nothing where you can even begin arguing that philosophy led science. Perhaps you'd like to make a case for General Relativity, but I'd disagree even more strongly---the core of GR's philosophy is "a good theory should be as mathematically unified as possible". That's again been very thoroughly mainstreamed, and anyway you'll find no basis for it in classical philosophy, unless you count Occam.
Finally, let's clear up the nature of the "Trouble with Physics". The trouble with physics is not that our theories are philosophically objectionable. There are
no internal inconsistencies, no existential/causal/epistemological paradoxes, no confusion, etc., in Quantum Mechanics or in General Relativity. That's not "the trouble." The trouble is, when trying to unify QM and GR, that we have
thousands of candidate theories, each of which is equally philosophically sound, physically plausible, and consistent with experiments. There is no way whatsoever that a Kantian thinker could sit down and look at (to pick and example) Randall-Sundrum warped gravity, or Type IIA Supergravity, and tell us that one of them is (or is not) unacceptable---since (assuming solutions to outstanding mathematical problems) both of them may well be able to describe all modern experimental data. That's "the trouble with physics": modern data is consistent with many
different theories, whose differences are visible only at 10^10 GeV. I can't imagine what you want a philosopher to add. "Is the theory consistent with the data? OK, uh, what about naturalness and anthropic arguments? Oh, you'd dealt with that. Um, have you tried thinking outside the box? Oh, that's where the dozens of theories came from. How about inside the box? Another dozen theories? OK." This is nothing specific to ultra-modern physics---there's no way that a Kantian philosopher could have sat down (prior to Maxwell's equations), and told us that there was anything philosopically wrong with Galilean relativity and the aether wave theory of light. There's no way that Democritus and Aristotle could have sat down and philosophically resolved their disagreement about atomism, because
given the data they had there was no way to distinguish a true theory of matter from a false one.
To sum up: "the trouble with physics" can't be solved by better epistemology; it'll be solved by better experiments, better math, or better physics---or possibly it won't be solved at all. Nothing in philosophy, in the past or the future, guarantees that the "real" theory of Nature can be distinguished from false theories
without 100-TeV-scale experiments. Please note also that physicists disagree on whether this is "trouble" at all.
