Well, can it arise or did it arise? For all I know, little is known about how it arose, though there is some speculation that it was maybe based on how blood clots/separates, so I guess that at least suggests that it can arise through empirical observation?

But how is that relevant to the question at hand? Especially given that I just chose humors and demons (concepts that were actually somewhat in conflict) as examples, and specifically as examples of hilariously wrong ideas--medical knowledge was not limited to those two ideas, and it's not like all of it was terrible. Some of the knowledge of how certain plants helped against certain symptoms, for example, was actually pretty decent.

Which is maybe the right moment to answer your other question:

> How do you think we acquired knowledge before the scientific method was devised?

How do you think we spoke to each other before grammar was devised?

The scientific method was not "devised", that is simply the name we give today to the (so far only) methodology that we have discovered to result in reliable knowledge about the world, and that we are formalizing and refining over the centuries to be more and more reliable by countering more and more weaknesses as they are being discovered.

People simply applied the method, without any explicit intention of "applying the scientific method", and without following any explicit strategy. People observed reality, people tried out ideas they had and observed the results, and repeated and refined ideas that worked, discarding ideas that didn't. The same people also used other strategies to form beliefs about the world, so their overall approach to gaining knowledge about the world was not particularly scientific. But the point is that you don't have to have a concious concept of the scientific method in order to use it to gain knowledge about the world, it's just that it helps a lot if you do, as that allows you to not waste time on other approaches, and maybe more importantly, to work on improving the method('s implementation).

Now, you could argue that modern scientific methodology is quite a bit advanced from crude try and error in past times, and that certainly is true. However, the original point of contention in this thread was the idea (that you suggested was not controversial) that culture could stand on its own as a reliable source of knowledge without scientific validation, so the question was not whether basic try and error is just as good as a double-blind medical study (which it obviously isn't), but whether something that is not even the result of try and error is just as good as something that is the result of modern scientific methodology.

Now, so far you have mostly tried to argue that there are areas where you know that scientific inquiry won't make progress, and your arguments for that so far have not been particularly convincing. While I agree that sociology probably in many ways is still at the "try and error" stage, and that the complexity seems overwhelming, and even that it is one of the likelier candidates to never achieve any sort of unified theory, I don't see any justification for you assertion that it's actually impossible.

But maybe more importantly: Even if I were to grant you that real progress in the scientific inquiry of sociology is impossible (which might be the case, after all--I just don't see any justification so far to actually accept that proposition), how would that be relevant to the original point of contention? Even if scientific progress is impossible, what is your justification that any other source of knowledge (such as culture) would be reliable?