Aren't we forced to require replication for a measure of truth in empirical studies? If that's universally accepted, shouldn't we demand that researchers come up with predictions of the form "do X and see result Y"? And if we accept that, then should we not discuss who is going do actually "do X" before research gets published?

From the outside perspective, it appears that a lot of people do "open-ended" experiments, write up some findings and pretty much no one tries to confirm the results with the notable exception of actual industrial applications (e.g., pharmacy or aircraft design), where the validation happens out of necessity.