"Progessively commit more to a hypothesis as you have more and more data to prove it."

That sentence is written in the imperative while I haven't spoken about what people should do but about what they are doing. "What are scientists doing?" is an empiric question answered by the history and philosophy of science.

Whether or not there such a thing as action at a distance is a big question and people at the time on the continent where confident that there wasn't and ridiculed people who believed there was action at a distance. They had just thrown out astrology because they didn't believe in action at a distance. But then there were the Englishmen who believed in action at a distance so the French started their 10 year expedition to go and prove them wrong.

If there would have been that big of a disagreement within the two world views than they likely wouldn't have gone out and invested the effort to settle the question about the shape but would have just went which what their theory predicted.