I disagree that “pure empiricism usually works pretty well”. It’s more that a failure of theory looks different: to someone who lacks the necessary theory, a problem simply looks intractable or anti-inductive or just plain confusing.
Economics is a great source of examples: consider rent control. To someone with no knowledge of rent control, the fact that it creates a shortage of housing units is surprising; to someone who’s been through econ 101, it’s obvious. To someone without the theoretical knowledge, it might not even be obvious that rent control has anything to do with the shortage at all—to the pure empiricist, the world is full of random surprises popping up all the time, and a housing shortage is just one more such surprise. Why would it have anything to do with rent control?
This leads into a broader point: theory tells us which questions to ask in the first place. Economics theory says “housing shortage? Check for rent control!”, whereas pure empiricism would just check every conceivable factor to see what correlates with housing shortages. It’s the same principle as privileging the hypothesis: a large amount of evidence is needed just to distinguish a hypothesis from entropy in the first place. Theory can provide that evidence: it doesn’t always give the right answers, but it gives us enough evidence to pick a hypothesis.
I disagree that “pure empiricism usually works pretty well”. It’s more that a failure of theory looks different: to someone who lacks the necessary theory, a problem simply looks intractable or anti-inductive or just plain confusing.
Economics is a great source of examples: consider rent control. To someone with no knowledge of rent control, the fact that it creates a shortage of housing units is surprising; to someone who’s been through econ 101, it’s obvious. To someone without the theoretical knowledge, it might not even be obvious that rent control has anything to do with the shortage at all—to the pure empiricist, the world is full of random surprises popping up all the time, and a housing shortage is just one more such surprise. Why would it have anything to do with rent control?
This leads into a broader point: theory tells us which questions to ask in the first place. Economics theory says “housing shortage? Check for rent control!”, whereas pure empiricism would just check every conceivable factor to see what correlates with housing shortages. It’s the same principle as privileging the hypothesis: a large amount of evidence is needed just to distinguish a hypothesis from entropy in the first place. Theory can provide that evidence: it doesn’t always give the right answers, but it gives us enough evidence to pick a hypothesis.