> "Yeah, sure. But how do we know which parts of our world are highly resistant to scientific inquiry?"

Let's focus on this for a bit, as it's clearly at the core of our different viewpoints.

I don't claim to have a crystal ball, but I can say which parts of the universe are hostile to science, and that can be summarised as 'that which we would struggle to measure'.

Using your example of the person from the 10th century, whilst they would have almost certainly not been able to envision all of the things we would eventually come to measure, the principals of measuring the physical world were in place, and we would have known, if not precisely but intuitively, some of the key concepts behind the measurement of physical objects, such as speed, acceleration, inertia, friction, heat, etc... Whilst our understanding of the physical world would've been much cruder than today, at least we had a framework by which we could explore it (at the level of detail available to us before the telescope and microscope were invented).

Contrast this with the study of the metaphysical. What concepts do we have that help us to measure the metaphysical? Perhaps some are around the corner, but at best all we can do at the moment is statistical analysis. To clarify, whilst term 'metaphysics' could be used to describe anything that describes our world without necessarily being part of it. I gave the example before of society, which I still think is the most straightforward one to explore. Depending on your field of view, it's possible to say society doesn't exist. For example, if a person lives a hermit lifestyle, are they still living within society, or does it take interacting with others to be part of a society? I would suggest it's the latter, and sociology as a field of study is one that (amongst other things) looks at how living in a group affects the individual. So what do these groups look like and how does an individual find their role within them? When we seek to understand complex topics, our instinct is to put together a simplified model by which to reason with. In order to simplify, we need to know how best to do so. Where can we start with this? Okay, let's imagine we start by studying group dynamics in smaller groups, such as those found in tribes of people. Let's imagine we discovered some commonly observable traits in such groups. We then seek to take these observations and apply them more broadly. What can we do? We could imagine that the broader society still lives in a series of tribes (the work tribe, the home tribe, etc...), and look for similar dynamics confined within them, and look for the effects of interplay between tribes. Let's say again that we were successful in doing so, and found commonly repeated patterns of behavior amongst different classifications of people. Now let's introduce something disruptive like a new technology that changes the group dynamic. Computers are a good example of this, as they have undoubtedly changed society, socially and economically. The first question to ask is, do the classifications of humans within a society need to change to accurately model the new world? To give a crude example, if an "alpha" in a group is the individual with the highest status within that group, there may have been a time when the alpha male was the physically strongest, but today that position is not as simple to define, as there are some aspects of life within society where that is still the case, and others where it is not. Therefore someone can be an "alpha" in one group whilst not being an alpha in all groups. How does that varying social status change behaviour? I would suggest models need to be updated to accommodate for all this additional variability. As societies constantly change, and these models along with them, what underlying truths are we really getting at here? Is the purpose of sociologists to act as historians, doing our best to capture the zeitgeist before it changes again? I would suggest that whilst such activity is an interesting, and something worthy of study, we aren't really establishing fundamental understanding but instead cataloging change. Almost everything in society is fluid, there's only a small number of constants. Do you see why this constantly changing nature makes it hard to build up scientific understanding that lasts?