That's a valid point. Indeed, my all-time favorite theorist was Feynman, and along with being a brilliant organizer and a profound thinker who always tried to get to "the core" of everything, he also always knew the observations that any successful theory had to predict. He never just said "this equation has to be right because it's in all the books", he would always cite an observation that the equation successfully explained. That shows he never fell so far "in love" with how things had to be theoretically that he lost sight of how they really are empirically.

I am all for a healthy sense of humility about what we "know" at any given time, as history has shown. Indeed, I would say the giant breakthrough of science came with Galileo and the simple recognition that we never know anything ahead of looking. Nature is its own authority, it need not conform to how we imagine it to be. But that just says why our theories should not be mistaken for anything other than our imaginings-- they still have an important place in science.

In my view the core goal of basic science is not to gain power over nature, as that exercise is a two-sided sword that brings in many more cultural and ethical issues, but rather it is simply to understand, to find what is simple and unifying and organizing among what is complex and chaotic and uncontrollable. When that is our goal, our "imaginings" are central, and whether or not they are "falsified" is more an issue of what the imaginings were supposed to achieve, moreso than if they are nature's real masters. Indeed, I think you are saying that nature is always the master of our theories, never the other way around, but still the theories are the purpose of the exercise-- because we already have nature.

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Logic is the grammar of truth.

Meaning and absolute certainty are incompatible, and profound meaning and absolute certainty are profoundly incompatible.

The only thing intelligence is capable of is recognizing itself.