If you think that's a straw-man, you would have hated the original draft on the OB NYC ML even more.

Isn't the problem that he conflated the two? At the very least, it looks to me like he nad no expectation that the ability to use or test a proposition had much bearing on its truth.

On the other hand, it does seem that he had no objection to "going out and looking".

Aristotle's physics reflects his desire to describe what he actually saw in the world, and his reluctance to either reduce physical phenomena to mathematical abstractions, or to report on what nature does when forced by experiments.