The periodic table of the elements has a lovely underlying theory based on the physical properties of electron orbitals. This cannot be elicited from students who don't know it.
Asking socratic questions about the effects of drugs on human bodies is useless.
Don't trust a socratic-trained engineer to build your skyscraper, or your pizza oven.
Of course you can't give students a periodic table and Socratically enquire how this came to be. What you can do is, through the Socratic method, elicit an understanding of the lovely underlying theory. That's far more valuable than being able to parrot the table from memory without understanding it.
I'm not sure what you mean by not being able to teach from empiric data--experiments seem to me to be a practical implementation of the Socratic method.
So you're right, sometimes you can't teach the facts. But you can definitely teach anything derived from empiric data... how was it derived in the first place? I think you can provide the data (in class experiments, a trip to the library, real research papers, etc), and then elicit discussion about what it means.
You could ask students which material is used to build planes, and then discuss which material would be better. At some point, you'll need to introduce the exact figures, but that's a small portion of the lesson. There's a reason why the back page of a textbook can hold most of the facts that the other 300 pages teaches - information and knowledge are mutually inclusive.