Empiricism, logic, and reason - vive la différence

The second note capturing some floating ideas.

I read a sequence of science reports yesterday.  I am not sure just what the sequence or particular points of inspiration were (they were only relevant after the fact) but they crystalized and reinforced something I already knew but which is worth remembering.

Specifically, I have a tendency to group a series of concepts together as very closely related to one another, to the point of being almost synonymous but which are in fact very distinct from one another, with their own strengths and weaknesses.  The concepts are:

Reason

Empiricism 

Facts and evidence

Logic

Scientific Method

I group them because so often, when you are using one concept, one technique, you are frequently using one or more of the others at the same time.  

Their distinctiveness was brought home by a couple of different papers read in close time proximity to one another.  Which papers and what their topics were was essentially irrelevant.

In one paper, they were doing a thought experiment and from that experiment came up with a new idea, a new concept worth testing.  Subsequent testing proved the utility of the new idea.  

The point was that this was essentially a couple of individuals sitting in a room processing knowledge and ideas in their heads at a conceptual level, following a train of reasoning to its logical conclusions.  No equipment.  No budgets.  No books or reports with data.  It was very clean.

But that is only one means by which epistemic frontiers are pushed back.

Manipulation of facts is another - experimentation.  What happens if we mix X with Y?  There might be a logical reason for doing so.  There might be a rational reason for doing so.  There might be an experiential reason for doing so.

Then there is logic, somewhat different from reason.  Logic can also take us to interesting ways to test the frontiers of knowledge.

The point is that logic, reason, experiment - they all have different strengths and different weaknesses.  Some of the papers were strong on logic but their reasoning was tattered.  Some vice-versa.   Some had a strong empirical base but their analytical treatment was weak.

Across the dozen or so papers, it seemed obvious that each had a particular strength in terms of logic or reason or empirical fact but none of the papers treated their topic equally strongly across all three vectors.  

I suspect that that is generally true but have never particularly focused on it before.  A paper was persuasive or not.  It had good methodology or not.  It had good analytic treatment or not.  I haven't really thought papers and their respective strengths across the three vectors of empirical data, logic, and reason.