The vocabulary of science, words like fact, hypothesis and discover, was mostly built in the 1600s. These words did more than describe a change already underway. They gave people the tools to have that change at all.
Nobody hunts for discoveries while they believe there is nothing new under the sun. The very idea of discovering something, and of naming a finding after the person who found it, spread only after the voyages to the Americas showed that the ancients had missed a whole continent.
When old texts count as the final word, people keep repeating claims that a simple test would disprove. For centuries writers repeated that garlic stops magnets from working. Science began when the authority of ancient writers gave way to testing what actually happens.
A fact needs more than reality. It needs a community with shared methods, ways of checking claims and ways of settling disputes, guided by the rule "take nobody's word for it." The things in the world exist before anyone names them, but facts about them only exist once they can be found and shared. So knowledge is socially built, yet built through contact with the real world.
Science came from several separate developments that met, not from one breakthrough. Printing spread and preserved ideas, perspective drawing made exact plans possible, and telescopes and microscopes revealed hidden worlds. Together they made a new way of knowing that keeps producing progress.