Synonymous with "scientific method." I use empirical here instead of scientific to help draw a bit of a distinction between the work of a professional scientist and the day to day action of a human subject in modernity, particularly western modernity. For example, a modern person goes in to the forest, hears a strange noise, and cannot immediately determine what the noise is from their memory. Being a sensible person, they begin to gather evidence with their senses. Can they see what it is? Maybe if they listen harder, they might get a better sense of what it might be. They might move around, to see if the thing is hidden. Conclusions are then drawn from the evidence, or absence of evidence. The modern person *knows* there is no such things as spirits, goblins or fairies etc, having been assured that no evidence has ever been found of them. They *know* that the only thing out here is them and the other animals endemic to the area, it must be a raccoon or meadow vole, something ultimately harmless. The empiricist is therefore assured in his perfectly ordinary and not at all colonized-by-goblins world, never having actually determined what made the sound they heard. It could have been a juvenile unicorn for all he knows, but in the world constructed by the mind, everything is as it should be. The empiricist is therefore quite adept at applying a tool, scientific inquiry, to all manner of every question, regardless of it's appropriateness. I readily concede that there are subjects of inquiry among which scientific truth reigns supreme, eg physics, chemistry, mathematics, "The hard sciences." I also readily concede that a great many subjects of inquiry are assisted greatly by the use of scientific method, such as sociology, psychology, etc. I think that astrophysics can very accurately describe the movements of the sun, moon and stars, I just don't believe that science can or will answer a question like "Why?" Why are the sun, moon, and stars there in the first place? Scientific method will struggle around the awkward shape of this question, being ill-fitted for it, before determining that there is no observable evidence for a reason for existence, therefore a reason must not exist. Thus, in [[telos|teleology]], epistemology, theology, philosophy, we are in a place where empiricism has limited grasp and even more limited applicability. Because I've made my home in both theology and in narrative art, I am skeptical of the universal applicability of empiricism to all subjects of inquiry that are of interest to the human being.