Mendel spent seven years in his monastery garden before he figured out what we now call Mendel's laws of heredity. Some of my colleagues, especially in the social sciences, reject not only Baconian induction but the very heart of scientific belief that we as scientists describe a reality that is out there. They think this is quaint and look for the day when the scales fall off our eyes and we will admit that reality is constructed. Another colleague in psychology claimed that all of science is just a way each generation constructs reality. He was not persuaded by his own argument, however, when one of his students, who got an F on the final, tried to show that the F was just a construction by his instructor and not an earned grade.
Artists construct a reality of their imaginations.
And they are very enjoyable visions. To the scientist it is the external reality that checks every scientific hypothesis and theory, constantly correcting it because our imaginations cannot fully anticipate nature. If there were no external reality to test our ideas or constructions, quack medicines should be as effective as those tested by carefully controlled experiments. Instead of penicillin we would be drinking concoctions made with turtle dung. Social scientists are probably correct when they claim our knowledge of society is largely a construction because only bits of history, culture, and the remnants of civilization may be left behind for us to reconstruct.