I had a thought last night that I've been toying with all day. It seems obvious that certain kinds of knowledge are completely inaccessible to other animals: language with recursion, "deep" representation of concepts, etc. They don't have this, of course, because Nature hasn't selected for them.
We have (to some extent) both of these traits, but it seems naive to think that we aren't limited in the same way, so we can only assume that there are certain aspects of the universe humanity cannot understand.
This is not to say that I'm advocating the teaching of intelligent design, or the space unicorn, or whatever, and I'm certainly not advocating transhumanism. But it does put into doubt radical empiricism: that only those things we can observe or reason out exist. In a sense, if we can't ever know about some certain aspect of the world, then it's indistinguishable from chance, and should not concern us. So from that anthropocentric point of view, radical empiricism is justified.
But what if we're entitled to incomplete knowledge of something? Then any form of empiricism seems less justified.
Enough philosophy.
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Empiricism in a practical sense is simply our "best guess" method to relieve our human nature of its curiosity into things we do not yet understand. Empiricism in this way has allowed mankind to "hit many brick walls", some that have been overcome and some that are still a mystery.
Hypothetically, then, if empiricism could be exhaustive (cover everything that we can possibly experience right now), would we still have some "brick walls"? And if so, would that mean that empiricism has failed us? Or would it only mean that we must use other means to meet our curious ends?
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