A forgotten historical event

[GuyOnInternet]

Empiric and the Empirical Method: The Philosophical Rejection of Common Sense

Let us begin with a man named Empiric. A philosopher, yes, but one who harbored a dangerous idea. He stood proudly before his peers one day and announced, “I have invented a new method. A revolutionary method. A method so novel that it deserves a name—and I shall call it The Empirical Method.”

The philosophers blinked.

Empiric continued. “I will drop rocks of different sizes. Pieces of wood. Heavy objects. Light ones. I will do so at different times of day, under different weather, and with different witnesses. I will record what happens and see if the results match Aristotle’s claim that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones.”

A few philosophers gasped. Others coughed uncomfortably. One murmured something about heresy.

When asked whether he had considered the problem of confirmation bias, Empiric smiled. “Yes. I have. And I propose a radical solution: other people will independently reproduce the results. That is how bias is defeated—not by asking me to pinky-swear I tried to disprove my own results, but by testing, retesting, and verifying through independent trials. If the claim is true, it should hold up no matter who tests it.”

“But surely,” one philosopher objected, “if this is Aristotle’s theory, it is he who should perform the tests to disprove it—not us, and certainly not you.”

Empiric looked incredulous. “That’s the whole point! If someone makes a claim about the world, the burden is on them to back it up—not the rest of us to accept it on reputation alone.”

“Let me get this straight,” said another, squinting. “You’re going to… what, drop both rocks at the same time… and watch what happens?”

Empiric nodded. “Yes. Repeatedly.”

The philosophers looked at him as if he’d suggested sacrificing a goat to measure wind speed.

“So, you’re saying we observe something… and that tells us the truth?” another asked with visible discomfort.

Empiric tried to remain calm. “Yes. It’s not complicated. If you have a theory, you test it. If it survives, it might be true. If it fails, it probably isn’t. This is how we can actually learn things about the world.”

“But have you considered,” came the inevitable voice, “that correlation does not imply causation?”

“I’m not correlating unrelated events,” Empiric said. “I’m directly testing a claim. If Aristotle says heavy things fall faster, and I drop heavy and light objects and they land at the same time, that’s not correlation—that’s contradiction.”

By now, Empiric was being accused of all sorts of academic heresies. He had no credentials, no institutional affiliation, no sacred scrolls proving he was allowed to question millennia-old dogma. But he persisted. “You don’t need to believe me,” he said. “Try it yourself. That’s the entire point.”

But of course, they wouldn’t. They preferred debating the metaphysical implications of gravity to actually testing it.