Dissolving the modernist / Postmodernist debate

There are two ways of knowing anything, both are forms of personal experience. Either you heard about it from someone or you directly observed it yourself. Indirect and direct learning.

Most of what we know is indirect. We believe some shit because someone told it to us. And there's a very good reason for this, because we can't observe everything for ourselves. If there's a war happening on the other side of the world, you don't travel to the war zone, you watch the fucking news. This is the source of postmodernist/poststructuralist intuitions about language and subjectivity.

But we also learn from seeing shit for ourselves and we can easily see through people's lies and bullshit from checking. That's the source of the intuition behind science and modernism. When you do observations and experiments you can plainly see that the authorities are lying to you or otherwise full of shit.

Both postmodernist and modernist views about the world are complete self-contradictory bullshit.

Science claims to be about observation and experiment and being skeptical of testimony, the so-called scientific method. And it's true that observing and experimenting are things that scientists do regularly. It's also true that scientists are skeptical about testimony at least until they are personally convinced. But Science itself can't be fundamentally about observation, because NO ONE PERSON CAN DO ALL THE OBSERVATIONS AND EXPERIMENTS FOR THEMSELVES. This is the reason why science has publishing in journals. If someone doesn't actually communicate their findings, NO ONE ELSE WILL KNOW ABOUT IT UNTIL A REDISCOVERY HAPPENS.

Publishing is a form of testimony dumbasses. Publishing is not direct observation. This is the reason why there is a replication crisis. This is the reason why fraudulent publications are major issue. It's not a solvable problem because the only way to solve it would be for every scientist to personally perform every observation and experiment for themselves. Which is impossible.

Postmodernism / Poststructuralism recognizes the social practices involved in science and knowledge production. But stupidly claims that this somehow means there isn't an objective reality. Because postmodernism can't seem to grasp the idea that anyone would ever learn anything from direct observation ever. So literally everything we believe is a social construct learned through language. This is fucking insane.

This issue is also why trust in experts rises and falls. Experts are often wrong about shit and they engage in outright fraud and deception. But they also know more than we do about shit, so simply dismissing experts and acting out of pure ignorance will also fail. And these cycles of failure produce the weird cycles of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism we see over and over and over again.