[xenophanes]

Can you give a statement of what you mean by "empiricism" that you wish to defend?

I agree with some of what you say, but I'm not sure what you're trying to vindicate.

Bear in mind that one can construct infinitely many theories logically consistent with every piece of evidence or empirical check done in the past, and which predict that the grass cure for the cold will work. These theories will consist of various disjointed assertions in a rather arbitrary and ad hoc manner. The problem with these theories is that they are terrible as explanations -- they are bad philosophically -- but they are not empirically refuted.

[nu23]

My goal was not to defend pure empiricism - that justifications for knowledge can come only from sense data. I just wanted to emphasize that, in your example, when we chose a good explanation instead of a bad one, the goodness of the explanation has a large empirical component.I am guessing that you agree with this but would focus on the non-empirical component. One non-empirical component of its goodness would be the complexity of its specification, the Kolmogorov complexity for instance.