Does theory ladeness mean I have to throw out science...and my senses...?

https://brucelambert.soc.northwestern.edu/con_proceed/The-theory-ladenness.pdf

So I read about this and how our perception, attention, memory, and interpretation are all affected by assumptions that we make, and also how it poses a problem for science itself. The most troubling was at the end of the link where they say it can override strong sensation in the cases of interpretation and memory.

And...does that mean I can't trust anything science says? I know on some level in spite of that shortcoming we have so much we owe to science and how well it works and what we've done with it. But on the other hand...the evidence is there. How can one trust science when it's shown theories affect how we perceive and interpret reality?

Does this mean solipsism? That other people aren't real? That I can't trust anything I think or remember or see? Would that mean my life is a lie? I was driving today and found myself doubting if everything I saw was real, and even now I find myself doubting if other people are real...

I'm reminded of another answer where I learned about the theory: What are the ontological implications of that “the universe is not locally real” in quantum mechanics?

I'm not sure what anti-realism is but I find it hard to fight against it.

From the wiki page it means:

In analytic philosophy, anti-realism is the position that the truth of a statement rests on its demonstrability through internal logic mechanisms, such as the context principle or intuitionistic logic, in direct opposition to the realist notion that the truth of a statement rests on its correspondence to an external, independent reality.[1] In anti-realism, this external reality is hypothetical and is not assumed

Anti-realism in its most general sense can be understood as being in contrast to a generic realism, which holds that distinctive objects of a subject-matter exist and have properties independent of one's beliefs and conceptual schemes.

Which to me sounds like solipsism, it sounds like science can't be trusted and my senses either. Is that true? Does that make all learning and experimentation just pointless? Am I living a lie, or even reality for that matter? Nothing makes sense anymore and I feel pretty isolated right now like when I first learned about solipsism and how I can't prove others are real. Now it seems like there is evidence for that with theory ladeness. Does that mean we can't trust doctors or therapists either since they are just operating on their theories and assumptions? How would one get help then? It seems like the more I ponder it the worse the implications get.

Some more evidence about this:

https://web.cortland.edu/russellk/courses/300sci/hdouts/laden.htm#:~:text=In%20philosophy%20of%20science%20the,do%20these%20expectations%20come%20from?

https://web.cortland.edu/russellk/courses/300sci/hdouts/theolad.htm#:~:text='Theory%2Dladenness'%20means%20loaded,brings%20to%20the%20observation%20setting.

This is an understandable reaction! Our education likes to present us with a view of the world that says there are Right and Wrong answers to everything, because that's how we measure the learning of our children and try to work out where additional investment of time and attention might be most helpful. It can be tough to come out of the world of early learning and realise that much of our knowledge and understanding is conditional, contextual and transient.

"Science" is not primarily a topic of established facts on which reality is grounded, but a methodology of building on shared experiments and models to try to come to an effective understanding of how things appear to work. Individual humans start from a place and time, we build up our understanding of things and we try to follow along as the world changes and our models and data expand and evolve as well. This knowledge shapes and changes the world we perceive, because we develop new and evolving understandings of what it contains and skills in how to work with it and interact with it.

For David Hume (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/), the absence of Human Nature from the methodology of scientific practice was a critical part of something that was classically mistaken about the "natural philosophy" of his contemporaries. Metaphysical doctrines were taken to be absolute foundational axioms on which everything else had to be derived or interpreted, but why should these abstract things be taken as absolute truths when the evidence for them is only partial, substantiated by perceptual evidence to some degree rather than definitive concrete proof?

The work of psychologists like Kahneman and Tversky on the importance of framing to human cognition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology)) is very much a reminder of the locality of human thinking, but this is not an obstacle to being able to navigate within your local surroundings in scientific theory and practice. You come to the table with presumptions, theories, heuristics and biases, and these will influence your ability to interact and learn from your surroundings, but this can change and grow as new data comes into view and you are exposed to and explore other ways of thinking and learning.

You are a grounded human being, you learn things that are close to you first, and that's okay! You might never learn the absolute for all time truth of things, and that's okay too! You don't need to to grow, to learn to understand and appreciate and to flourish and do great things.

You ask:

it sounds like science can't be trusted and my senses either. Is that true?

My first impression when reading your post: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Science is the best method we have to obtain general knowledge. The method has its presuppositions and its limitations. Serious scientists know this and take it into account.

Most of all: Science does not provide final results with ultimate justification. Science is a process of ongoing hypotheses, they are named theories. Science is able to check its results and to identify previous errors. It tries to avoid them and to improve the approach.

Science progresses by explaining more phenomena on the basis of more powerful theories.

Some general sources for the theory of science are Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As well as Karl Popper "Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge".

To a large degree, but we shouldn't consider them to be perfect.

They are generally reliable, but it's also been well-demonstrated that our senses fail sometimes. People see and hear things that aren't there (whether that's a more rare vivid hallucination, or much more common experiences like seeing a hooded figure in the dark in your house that turns out to be a coat rack). People misremember or their minds fabricate significant details of events. People vividly remember things that never happened.

The way to make senses more reliable, and thus more trustworthy, would be to apply some scrutiny to them, to corroborate different sensory experiences with one another, to consider the cases when senses are reliable and when they aren't (what you see in broad daylight tends to be more reliable than what you see while in bed in the middle of the night).

This also applies to biases. This generally relates more to things one can't directly see or see in its entirety: e.g. you might have a bias towards a particular conclusion about some broader claim, and then you put too much weight into supporting evidence and disregard contrary evidence. But we've also demonstrated e.g. that people remember events differently if they are primed.

To some degree, but scientists are well-aware that biases affect people's thinking. In fact, scientists (at least some of them) are the ones that have studied, tested, verified and explained most of what we know about biases.

Scientific papers are peer reviewed with the intent to counter biases. Science, foundationally, tries to avoid starting by assuming that any given claim is true. Every claim should ideally be verified. Untestable or unverified things should be left out of science. Many theists, for example, believe untestable things about gods, but the ones that make good scientists leave these beliefs at the door - what we learn about the world may affect their god beliefs, rather than the other way around. We build our understanding of the world through justified claims, rather than starting from some presuppositions. The ones that make bad scientists try to figure out what's true through the lens of their god belief, and they extremely-commonly end up misrepresenting data and misrepresenting what others say, when they struggle to make sense of those things by starting from some unjustified presupposition.

What shows the reliability of science, and why you should trust it, is the fact that much of modern society is built on its conclusions, from computers, to cars, to houses, to medicine, and even to things like food production. All of those things work very reliably. It's the best method we have for obtaining knowledge.

While it is true that we can't be 100 000% sure that the external world outside of our mind exists, one could argue that it existing is the best explanation for the evidence, that solipsism posits some additional (known or unknown) model of existence, beyond the observable world. This is an unjustified and unnecessary claim that explains no evidence and has no predictive power. So therefore we might reject it.