Terminology is hard, but I think probably the best way to think of philosophy is this: philosophy is the act of defining, or attempting to define, a framework for making claims (i.e. a belief system or mental model) - as well as the act of deciding when, or in which contexts, to apply any such framework.

So in that sense, the formulation of the scientific method was an act of philosophy. But any insights made within that framework are not acts of philosophy - they are acts of science.

Similarly, the formulation of Euclidean geometry would be an act of philosophy. But the act of proving, for example, the Pythagorean theorem, within the pre-established framework of Euclidian geometry is not philosophy - it is math.

The whole goal of philosophy is to establish frameworks that are useful to us (and to figure out what it even means for something to be useful to us), and to evaluate the relative success of those frameworks to that end.

Once established, any given framework doesn't need philosophy per se for its own sake, but we humans always rely on philosophy at some level in order to evaluate how well our existing frameworks are serving our needs, and whether an existing framework may need to be tweaked, or a new framework needs to be created.

With all that said, I’ll try to answer the actual question posed by the article — i.e. is philosophy a nuisance to science?

With respect to what I said above, I think we could define ‘scientism’ as simply the philosophically derived conclusion that the framework we call ‘science’ is doing a very good job at being useful, and isn’t in any serious need of tweaking or reimagining. And a strong framing of ‘scientism’ may imply, further, that science is the only framework that is useful at all.

I think I would disagree with the strong framing, for the simple fact that the qualia of each person’s consciousness is still hidden to scientific testing — which means we are not yet able to “unify” science with the most fundamental aspects of our experience.

But I also think that a scientist does not have to engage in philosophy in order to practice science. To clarify, the decision to practice science at all, as well as all decisions on determining and prioritizing which questions to ask within the scientific framework, are philosophical questions. But the act of practicing science itself (e.g. designing tests, and recording findings) does not need philosophical intervention, and may find such insertions to be annoying.