"No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it." Many identities, lifes, careers, organizations have been built around the assumption

"No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it." Many identities, lifes, careers, organizations have been built around the assumption that objective and absolute knowledge is possible, truth can be defined, reality must have a solid core at its foundation. We're talking countless man-centuries of emotional, intellectual and social investment. No one wants to shake the branch they're sitting on. And yet, the way I see it if someone claims to be engaged in science or philosophy, that is precisely what they must do, rather than summarily discard anything they have been conditioned to consider ridiculous. Between "we don't know anything about anything, might as well drop the whole science thing" and "we know with absolute certainty that <something>" there is this huge grey area, where we seem to know enough about what seems to be reality that we can often predict it, shape it to our liking and build cool things. To me, the most interesting question of this whole postmodernism vs scientific inquiry/analytic philosophy debate is why so many are so incredibly uncomfortable in that area (where, one might argue, life actually happens), that they must either, with an almost religious zeal, insist on having found absolute truth (despite no evidence having ever been produced to that effect and, allowing for the existence of objective reality, tons of evidence of having been wrong in the past) or altogether deny the obvious usefulness of the scientific method. It seems that more often than not we can only engage with reality while pretending that we can know, understand and control it with absolute certainty and if/when disavowed of that illusion, are ready to immediately fall into some form of nihilism, denying any objective approach to anything. What I'm saying is that there's nothing wrong with using an analytic/scientific approach to make good things happen and generally have a good time while at the same time not being quite as trigger happy with the "pseudoscience", "ridiculous" and "impossible" labels when something doesn't fit our ideas of how the world is supposed to be. Let's not forget there was a time when one could get locked up for suggesting the earth was orbiting the sun.