For one, I think Feynman had a more complex perspective on the situation than what that single quote would indicate. He probably would not have written The Char

For one, I think Feynman had a more complex perspective on the situation than what that single quote would indicate. He probably would not have written The Character of Physical Law otherwise. You can see, however, from how it's written that he's not working in the tradition of academic philosophy of science—but that's probably more an issue with their methods than with the validity/interest of their subject matter. Also, it seems like there are increasingly many places in science where having a sort of self-awareness about what one's doing while practicing is useful. Formalization of observation and measurement in physics would be part—but what sticks out to me even more is the way competing theories are weighed against one another. We've generalized beyond particular theories to working in a framework capable of evaluating and comparing various competing theories using standard measures (and aesthetic judgement)—much like evaluating software architectures. This has occurred somewhat in parallel with philosophy of science increasingly pointing out that scientific formulations have a degree of arbitrariness to them (in a similar manner to how you can express a single algorithm many many different ways)—rather than being either truth or not truth.