I have to agree and disagree with the gist of the article presented here.

While on a purely philosophical level, science is never settled. There is the real world of collected observations that make a consistent picture. That does for all intents and purposes, outside of the purely philosophical indeed get settled eventually.

What I mean by that is that certain things have so very much observation behind them that one approaches what I will call a Cartesian limit.

By a Cartesian limit, I mean that the only way that all of those observations from so many different sources and tracks of understanding could all be consistently lying to us, is if we were actually living in a world that was dominated by something fooling all of our senses and instruments all of the time. The “evil genius” of Descartes would be the “real story” In more pedestrian terms, the only way that the “real world” could be different than all the data and observation we have is if we were all living in the Matrix.

An example of this might be the notion that the Earth is round.

There is no new discovery short of something that invalidates all other discoveries that could possibly change that. Another example might be that the Earth orbits the sun. Again, the only way for that not to be true, given all of the evidence that we have of it being true would be if everything, and by everything, I mean literally everything else was a lie.

So, as a purely philosophical argument, yes indeed, science is never fully settled and indeed we all might be disembodied brains floating on a ship somewhere being fed a virtual reality that completely fools our senses and makes a false virtual world.

That is true. However, it is unlikely and certainly useless to debate. For those who like to get lost in Cartesian doubt, I say stub your toe. It hurts doesn’t it? The pain is real enough.