Empiricism is, roughly, a belief that experience and observation are the most reliable sources of knowledge. (Normally this is contrasted with “rationalism”…) It might also be described as the tendency in Western philosophy to recognize the limits of a priori beliefs, theories, or assumptions, in understanding our present experience—a kind of humility about the limits of human consciousness: it is a resistence to and skepticism of established, and categorical, ways of thinking or comprehending. When we say we are doing an “empirical” study of mammalian immune systems, it means that we resist narrative forms, expected patterns and causalities, as well as ideologies or grand world views, as a basis for understanding it … and instead of those things (all of which we can subsume under the heading of analysis), we try observation. The observation/theory distinction actually plays a more complex role in empirical philosophy, but it can be simplified by saying that for empiricists, the production of knowledge is a process, maybe even a kind of dance, between these two types of mental activity; both inherently limited and temporary, but with the role of the theorist or the analyst always in a subordinate and deferential position.
So we meet our scientist at a bar—let’s say she’s an immunologist—and we ask her about her research, and she doesn’t say that she’s learning something about the way our bodies fight infections. She says she’s learning how peak and trough hemoglobin distribution influences the capacity of white blood cell counts to increase in the blood streams of infant mice when their cardiovascular systems are hypoxic—in other words when the little critters are totally exhausted—and specifically whether hypoxia triggers different types of immuno-response at hemoglobin peaks, as opposed to hemoglobin troughs. And just when you think she’s done hyper-specifying her investigation, she adds three words, almost thoughtlessly, automatically, but to you, the artist, they cut across everything like the pedal-bass entry with the fifth subject in a fugue you thought was four parts...and the words are “in my lab.” “I am learning how hemoglobin distribution influences the white blood cell counts of the hypoxic infant mice in my lab”; she doesn’t know if the independent variables have the same impact on mice in Tunisia or even in Toledo. So, if you are searching for a cure for HIV/AIDS, this is a profoundly humble way of saying it.
A. The Conjunctive Relation
Degrees of intimacy (in vaguely increasing order)
	1.	Withness
	2.	Closeness in time, or simultaneity
	3.	Closeness in space, adjacency (BLC: or permeation)
	4.	"Similarity and difference, carrying the possibility of many inferences"
	5.	Relations of activity, "tying terms into series involving change, tendency, resistance, and the causal order generally."
	6.	Relations "between terms that form states of mind"…"immediately conscious of continuing each other." 

read from "A priori (p 197) -- to 'Dyak heads' "

"The conjunctive  relation  that  has given most trouble  to philosophy is the co-conscious transition, so to call it, by which one experience passes into another when both belong to the same self. About the facts there is no question. My experiences  and your experiences are 'with' each other in various external ways, but mine pass into mine, and yours pass into yours in a way in which yours and mine never pass into one another." (197)
So, it’s here that  the issue of ambiguity, not as an aesthetic, as you might have imagined I was implying in my opening remarks ... but as an epistemology, a way of knowing... comes to the foreground.
Say we are trying to determine some differences between women’s brains and men’s brains, and we observe that women tend to have denser, more abundant dendrite-networks connecting the brain hemispheres. We also observe that patients with severed dentrites have difficulty recognizing emotions in the faces of others. Then we theorize that women are more sensitive to the emotional determinants of facial expressions. If we can confirm the theory in a series of observations, and we’re careful in recording the circustances of those observations, then the theory becomes a kind of knowledge.
But what did we mean by "women tend to have?" What if the data also show that women tend to fall along a wider range of the spectrum of sensitivity, while most men cluster in a moderately low level of sensitivity, and if we also find that the ends of the spectrum are populated by men over 45? And what if 15% of men—alpha men—are as sensitive as the top 5% of women, even though the other 80% bring's men's sensitivity average down? And what if in some but not all studies, the 80% of men are more sensitive to strangers than acquaintances, and under a few other specific conditions of disempowerment?
Is that knowledge? James’ “Dyak head” metaphor insists to us that it is. And our immunologist at the bar tends to agree when she’s in the middle of an experiment... this is the humility that permeates the value system of my scientist friends and family, and makes me scratch my head whenever artists and critics calling themselves post-structuralist condemn the sciences—on which so much of the future of the progressive movement depends—to a Spock-like place, a square peg in a round hole, if you’ll pardon my multi-layered pun—in their unwittingly humanist world view,  
But there is point where that earthy skepticism of “big science” converges with James‘ critique of conventional empiricism, and begs that we strive for something more radical: it is precisely the point at which our humble neurologist completes his fifth experiment and longs for a little more meaning in his life. At the same point where Feynman discovers the universal forces of mass and time through a romance with surfing and beat poetry, neuroscientists V.S. Ramachandran discovers what basic desires are triggered by all great art, and Oliver Sachs and Douglass Hoffsteader discover the spiritual or cosmic significance of Bach, our neurologist now finds himself interviewed on NPR, and he finds himself ignoring the statistical nuances of dendrite distribution, because the time has come for the mythical cold-war scientist to emerge as a prophet. At first it’s just a joke, then its innocent poetry, but finally it becomes a yahoo headline, gone viral, far beyond the resistance of any humble, skeptical artist’s infantile resistance—beyond any immune system that the semiotics of popular culture has yet generated: the neurologist has a theory about culture, and we all listen. He ignored the complexity of men and the environmental conditions explained to us why women ask for directions easily, and why they like to shop.