[tshaddox]

The fact that empiricism is false was a revelation to me as a young adult, after reading so much about the triumphs of science and reason and getting very excited (mistakenly) that you can get away without bothering with pesky things like epistemology. Of course, Quine and others pointed out that empirical observations are useless without explanations both of the phenomenon being measured and the measurement device itself (including, for example, the human vision system). And I believe it was Deutschmark who pointed out that empiricism is itself an epistemology which had to be invented. It turns out that it tended to be a significant improvement upon previous widespread epistemologies, but that doesn’t mean it’s not false. :)