Would an “independent” thinker be wiser than an academic/famous philosopher?
I used the word "independent" because it's the best adjective I could find to describe the profile I wanted to talk about, but of course it's impossible to be completely independent of social norms etc, we're humans... If that makes it easier to understand my point, imagine a person who has access to everything but philosophy, and doesn't have a clue about their method, etc. Imagine they're trying to paint a picture of reality, they're going to have to use other resources, which could be by other disciplines (science, psychology,...) or their personal experience by exploring nature, cultures, talking to a lot of people,... Do you think their theories would be wiser than those from philosophy ?
And what you're trying to say is that science is more dependent of social norms etc than philosophy ? Because in that case I totally disagree, the fact that scientific theories keeps being test by experiments is, in my opinion, a more objective window to the world then the endless debates of philosophers which are based on other debates, which are based on other debates and on and on where no one really knows where a theory comes from except from pieces of logic and imagination.
Well philosophy of science mostly studies science itself, the aim isn't to come up with theories that have scientific grounds. And analytic philosophy uses a few concept of formal logic but it certainly doesn't try to gather data from science as grounds for their theories. At least not that I know of, if you know a branch of those which focuses on what I just explained, please tell me.