One thing people say a lot which is just uncomplicatedly false is that philosophy of science makes no impact on actual science. With tolerable frequency ideas or concepts from philosophy of science make the leap over to scientific investigation. Some examples then a moral.
Sometimes it's because a philosopher does technical work which is followed up on by scientists. So Carnap seems to have been influential on early work in AI or machine learning by multiple paths, largely through his work in logic and probability.
Sometimes it's because disciplinary boundaries are porous and a philosopher is also directly working in the sciences. A rather illustrious example is Suppes en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_S… but this sort of thing still goes on. This is a lovely paper, for instance: cailinoconnor.com/wp-content/upl…
Sometimes it's because philosophers work on issues around methodology or institutional design in science and so indirectly shape science. Eg Carole Lee has been working on bias in peer review for a long time and is an author on highly cited papers thereon
faculty.washington.edu/c3/Lee_et_al_2…
faculty.washington.edu/c3/Lee_et_al_2…
And other times its because in a nebulous way philosophers affect scientists' self image or self understanding. E.g. how Popper's notion of falsification or Kuhn's notion of a paradigm filtered into general culture. More field specific, Hempel did this in psychology and history.
The moral: when scientists say this it's often because they don't know the history (even the recent history) of the concepts they work with, or are unaware of what's going on in nearby fields, or have so much imbued an idea that it seems common sense rather than philosophical.
But I think more than any of that people expect philosophy to be something grand. It's somehow not what people expect philosophy's influence to look like - an odd concept here or a nebulous feel there. They want a comprehensive overall approach to life. Lower your expectations.
