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They're not "touchy", there's just an effort to censor one (or more) side. Maybe because there is in fact a fact of the matter one can appeal to.
The claim was not that the process of science cannot be corrupted. The claim was that there's at least some theoretical yardstick some evidence that could be offered on many issues or some prediction that could be validated. The people who do things like try to stop genetic data being available for intelligence research or studies being done on smoking or gun deaths aren't evidence for the other side, they are proof for the claim: both sides seem to have some sense of where the confirming or disconfirming evidence is, one side has simply decided to defect.
And nothing can really eliminate the risk of defection so it's hardly damning for science that some do.
There is (seemingly) no (obvious) empirical fact that will settle the debate over whether MTF transsexuals are women, and yet the claim "Caitlin Jenner is still a man" would be censured very aggressively in lefty spaces.
The same goes for religious claims, ethical claims, all sorts of claims for which no empirical verification is possible.
I previously argued that a sentence need not be empirically verifiable in order to be meaningful or truth-apt in general. So, if you're trying to assert that "being able to answer to a ground truth" just is the same as "being empirically verifiable", I would reject that.
I think there's a difference between censoring speech made for claims that we cannot really settle beyond raw power or tolerance and censoring research that theoretically can settle those claims. It leads to a strange agreement between the censor and their victim on the stakes in a way that doesn't have to be true in other case.
Maybe Frankfurt's distinction between lying and bullshit - lying at least acknowledges the concept of truth even as you point people away from it, bullshit denies that the truth is meaningful in the first place.
Yes, statements can be truth-apt without being empirically verifiable in practice. OrAnd there are cases where the stakes or what would settle the issue are themselves in doubt. In which case there's nothing for it but philosophy I suppose , since that's the role it can maintain in a world where science is ascendant.
I think a lot of the actual culture war debates do not escape empiricism in practice though, even if people try to insist that it's just a matter of differing definitions floating in the ether.
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