Wish someone had told me that I wasn't doing real science before I started in academia, would have saved me a lot of time and effort.
On a more serious note, seems like weird gatekeeping of what constitutes scientific discovery and what doesn't.
Scientific discovery is learning new facts about the world. Inventing new contraptions to help us in our goals is technology. I.e. I don't think anyone would call Henry Ford a scientist or Albert Einstein an inventor. I thought it's basic and well-understood distinction.
If you follow the constructivist philosophy of science (spoiler alert: I do) then absolutely Albert Einstein is an inventor. He invented a mental model (essentially a lossy compression) of some parts of reality that better fit observed phenomena than its predecessor. Our mental/scientific models are not descriptions of reality; objective reality is unknowable. What they are, are tools (technologies!) that we can use to predict effect, given a cause and a state.
Is constructivist philosophy of science an independent axiom or does it have testable predictions? E.g. is there a function from theorems of ZFC to {invented, not invented}?
it's a philosophy, so no it doesn't have testable predictions - but neither does objectivism, its counterpart. But then, testable predictions don't tell you about the nature of reality so c'est la vie.
> is there a function from theorems of ZFC to {invented, not invented}?
Can you derive definitions of inventions versus discoveries from set theory? No, probably not. You can't derive the smell of a rose from set theory either though so it's probably not a very good theory of everything.
