The case for the scientific world view rests on the claim that science deals with truth. However elegant a scientific theory may be, and no matter how distinguished its originator, if it does not accord with experiment and observation it must be rejected.
This image of science as a pure and objective distillation of real world experience is, of course, an idealisation. In practice, the nature of scientific truth is often much more subtle and contentious.
At the heart of the scientific method is the construction of theories. Scientific theories are essentially models of the real world (or parts thereof), and a lot of the vocabulary of science concerns the models rather than the reality. For example, scientists often use the word 'discovery' to refer to some purely theoretical advance.
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To be clear, the notion that science deals with truth, in sense above, assumes that meanings transcend semiotic systems and are either theorised truthfully or not. From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, however, meaning is a property of semiotic systems only, and science is concerned with reconstruing meanings — already construed of experience in language — as theoretical meanings that are realised in language and other attendant semiotic systems made possible by language.
In this view, the accordance of theory with experiment and observation is not objective truth, but what is intersubjectively assessed as valid within the most systematic and self-consistent approach to meaning-making.
Accordingly, science is not a "distillation of real world experience", but a reconstrual of meanings already construed of experience. So scientific theories do model the real world, but in the strict sense that the real world is meaning already construed of experience.
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