The empirics practiced the “medical art” without relying on reasoning; they wanted to benefit from chance observations by making guesses, and experimented and tinkered until they found something that worked. They did minimal theorizing.
Empirics do minimal theorizing. This is an important point. Forming a theory results in confirmation biases where only evidence that supports the theory will be considered.
Campbell's example of collecting mounds of evidence for the China project is a good one.
