“The tendency of empiricism, unchecked, is always anti-realist; it has a strong tendency to degenerate into some form of verificationism: to treat the question of what there is (and even the question of what we can – intelligibly – talk about) as the same question as the question of what we can find out, or know for certain; to reduce questions of metaphysics and ontology to questions of epistemology.”
—Strawson, G. (1987, p. 267)
Strawson, G. (1987). Realism and causation. The Philosophical Quarterly, 37, 253–277.