science

Then your view of epistemology is skewed by misrepresentations.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Traditionally it's divided into two branches: rationalism and empiricism. Modern science adheres to empiricism, but without some degree of rationalism, pure empiricism would be reduced to a set of facts with no glue to hold them together.

"All apples are fruits but not all fruits are apples" is a rationalist statement because it implies "If it's an apple, then it's a fruit" but not "if its a fruit, then its an apple." It's grounded on the premise that apples are a type of fruit, which is an empirical fact based on the characteristics of fruits and apples matching that criteria. But the conclusion that the not all fruits are apples is a rationalist deduction.

That's a simplistic example, and sounds pointless and intuitive, but the same rules apply in more complex scenarios. And if someone is a rational person, then rationalism should sound intuitive. It's like saying "a triangle's vertices add up to 180°." It's not relative.

Skepticism is different from Epistemology, although there's some overlap. But there are healthy and unhealthy ways of doing skepticism. Saying "I won't believe anything without sufficient evidence" is healthy skepticism. Saying "I won't believe anything ever and I'll doubt all evidence presented to me" is unhealthy skepticism.

There's also radical skepticism which asks "Can we ever truly know anything?" It's about systematically doubting every possible thing, in effect being skeptical of even the human capacity to know anything beyond a doubt. This originated as a neoplatonic school of thought during the hellenistic era, but in modern philosophy it's more associated with DesCartes's Meditations and something called Cartesian Doubt, which is more of a thought-experiment rather than an actual claim.

It basically goes "In order to know anything for sure, first we must doubt everything, and then only allow ourselves to believe that which we can know beyond a doubt." He then presents a rationalist argument to prove that the first thing that he can verify is that he himself does indeed exist, because if he didn't then he wouldn't be able to question whether or not he really exists. Thus, the "Cogito Ergo Sum" argument.

Someone who stops reading after the first meditation might think that means he's a solipsist, but he goes on to later arguments to prove that he can also trust his senses/perceptions to give him satisfactory evidence of objects in his environment.

Bear in mind that he was writing before the scientific method was formalized, and it likely never would have been developed if it weren't for the way he revolutionized the philosophical tradition. He wrote at just around the cusp between the late-Renaissance and early-Modern eras, and arguably one of the defining features of this era shift is the way in which the philosophical tradition altered course due to the influence od his work. Later thinkers (i.e., during the Enlightenment) built upon his work when they formalized the scientific method.

Even the shift into post-modernism in the mid-twentieth century was due to the influence of a philosopher who framed his work as a radical critique (and divergence from) the work of DesCartes, which wouldn't have been possible without the advances in philosophy that had taken place over the centuries since DesCartes revolutionized the tradtion. That's how "dialogue" or "dialectic" works in the history of philosophy: even if you disagree with something and present an entirely new argument as a response, you can't ignore the influence that the older argument had on the formation of your rejection of it.

But philosophy shouldn't cloud science.

Good philosophy doesn't cloud science. If somebody is using bad philosophy, or pseudo-philosophical tautologies, to obfuscate scientific discovery, then what they're doing is sophism, not philosophy.