How do you know if your boss is mad at you? Or if someone is interested in you romantically? Or if a landscape is beautiful or ugly? Not all knowledge is gaine

How do you know if your boss is mad at you? Or if someone is interested in you romantically? Or if a landscape is beautiful or ugly? Not all knowledge is gained through empirical methods. We know that because people had knowledge, including sophisticated technology, before there was a scientific method, i.e. before the 16th century. Most of our knowledge is gain through interpretation of the world...basically, doing the various things our minds do to arrive at conclusions. In the humanities, we (I am a humanist though also a programmer) try to hone our interpretive ability. We have a bunch of fancy names for ways to do that, like hermeneutics and dialectic and rhetoric, but basically you do it through practice. There's bad interpretive work, just like there's bad scientific work. But thinking empiricism is the be-all of knowledge is kind of silly. Do you use the scientific method to decide if you should kick a dog or pet it? Whether you beleive a politician's statement? Wheter a newspaper is trustworthy? No, you go through a process of modelling that other consciousness. That's interpretation.