Perhaps the most empirical observation we can make, present all around us, is that humans are terrible scientists. So easily fooled by optical illusions, differing vantage points, constant misapprehensions, and a sheer inability to apply rationality in our daily decision-making, we employ machines to count, measure, and process all that we cannot. Thank the Science Gods for science, which enables us to render scientific and explain scientifically all of that which we are not and do not understand scientifically. Thank the Science Gods for the Great Intelligent Design of Science, Science being perhaps the greatest artist--and PMB says this without irony--in the history of the world.
Science, like art, is a perfect self-sealing argument: defined scientifically through the scientific process, everything that can be crammed into this artificial framework can be churned out with a scientific explanation. Defined subjectively and contextually, everything that can be framed under the banner of art can be explained artistically. The difference between empirical truth and experienced truth is vast, though the presumed primacy of the former is as much a construct as the latter, and brings us no closer to an objective Truth, despite its claims of 'little objectivities' and its strategic essentialisms. The idea of science as the all-powerful and all-encompassing, general mode of progress and discovery, is crude and shortsighted, and ought not to be tolerated. From a hapless poet, William Blake, "Jerusalem":
They Plow'd in tears, the trumpets sounded before the golden Plow
And the voices of the Living Creatures were heard in the clouds of heaven
Crying; Compell the Reasoner to Demonstrate with unhewn Demonstrations
Let the Indefinite be explored. and let every Man be judged
By his own Works, Let all Indefinites be thrown into Demonstrations
To be pounded to dust & melted in the Furnaces of Affliction:
He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer:
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars
And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power,
The Infinite alone resides in Definite & Determinate Identity
Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falshood continually
On Circumcision: not on Virginity, O Reasoners of Albion
