> Much of Capital is the
> building of ever-more-complex conceptual relationships from a simple
> starting point.
This may be true, but doesn't it also work the opposite way? I mean, the most complex thing in the whole book is the commodity, which Marx puts at the beginning and is hardly a "simple starting point." And doesn't the building of relationships come in fits and starts, moving backward and forward, from complex to simple? For instance, the last chapter of the book goes back to the beginning of the story, how capital was created.
> That doesn't mean empirical verification is
> unimportant, just that reality is structured in ways which are only
> observable in their effects, i.e. you can't directly observe the
> structures,
Again, I don't think this describes good empiricism. Effects don't reveal some hidden structure. They are the structure (or whatever you want to call it), and empiricism investigates them.