Empiricism in the Martial Arts

Scientific empiricism is an important concept when discussing a contested subject. If the subject isn't empirical, like the existence of God, then what's the point of discussing it? Nothing will change either arguer's mind. There will always be moot subjects. But the subjects of martial arts, the best art, art vs. art, etc...are very much empirical subjects, despite the efforts of the traditional martial arts community. Now the subject of martial arts is more limited when it comes to discussing more concrete subjects, like how many atoms are in a Hydrogen molecule. We don't have the necessary testing procedures available to determine the 'ultimate' martial art, because the reality is there is no 'ultimate' martial art. But there are better arts than others. That's a different subject for a different day though.
    When I talk about empiricism in the martial arts, what I mean is, how we verify the effectiveness of our training. In a laboratory, scientists would likely go through the scientific method, a concept we've all undoubtedly heard of, being something most of us learned in the 3rd grade. Scientists use the scientific method in coming up with and proving a hypothesis. It should be our job as martial artists to do the same. In a convenient world this would look like: address an issue or problem you're trying to solve (doing background research), coming up with a new technique to address the issue (constructing a hypothesis), testing this technique out against an opponent that's both unaware and unaware to what you're doing (testing your hypothesis), but regardless knows what he's doing (a skilled partner), and finally to regard or disregard the technique depending on the results (analyze and draw conclusions).

     To many, this shouldn't sound too controversial at all. It's perfectly reasonable. But to the shady individuals and scammers that encompass the martial arts community, empiricism is their worst enemy. What could be worse than testing to see if you're really full of shit? It would ruin many of these people's businesses. This also goes for a large portion of the TMA community, that is not purposefully trying to scam anyone, but prefer shadier methods of testing skill such as kata's and board breaking. I state that these are shadier methods because there's absolutely no empiricism involved in the process of doing kata's and board breaking. There is no one there to resist your efforts to perform a kata, and the only thing stopping you from breaking a wooden board is physics. Some will argue it's just a different training tool, and that's fine, but plenty of schools rely more on it than sparring, or even use it as a replacement for sparring.
    Bottom line is that empiricism serves as a form of quality control in the martial arts community. It not only weeds out bad styles from good ones, but it helps our styles get better, by holding us accountable for the things we say and teach. And it doesn't have to be a conscious effort on your part or your teachers part for it to be empirical. The acts of doing full contact sparring should be more than enough. It's when a library of our techniques go untested, and we hide behind kata's, board breaking, and other smoke and mirror tactics, that we should be worried.