There is something that people frequently misunderstand about science & postmodernism. The misconception maintains that postmodernists deny an objective reality to exist while scientists believe they have already found it. Both of these are wrong.

In reality, the pure essence of postmodernism & the pure essence of science both accept that a reality exists and both are aware that we can never be truly sure of having objective knowledge of what it is. The difference is in what this leads them to do.

For the pure postmodernist, the fact that reality exists is not denied but is also largely uninteresting because of his radical skepticism that it can ever be got at due to cultural assumptions & existing knowledge & categories within which we think.

What is interesting & important to the postmodernism is what the cultural assumptions, knowledge & categories are & why they got developed that way which they assume to have happened in the service of power. The question is 'Who benefits from believing this?" not "Is this true?"

For the pure scientist, the fact that we can never be sure of having obtained objective knowledge is not denied but is also largely uninteresting because dwelling there prevents people from developing models that work in order to understand the world & humans better.

What is interesting & important to the scientist is what reality is actually out there to be discovered & understood so she needs to use methods that will minimise any barrier to this which includes cultural assumptions, existing knowledge & categories within which we think.

So the postmodernist will concede a reality to exist but then focus on culture & discourses & power while the scientist will concede human bias to exist, but minimise this with reduction of compounding variables, falsification, replication, peer review & then do science.

Of course, the pure postmodernist & the pure scientist do not actually exist & everyone really exists somewhere on a scale between them but this is what the conflict is about when postmodernists & scientists argue with each other.

I think it is clear that the scientific approach is superior because it does take significant, practical steps to address the problem that postmodernists are pointing at - that of human bias, self-interest, error & assumptions. The scientific method is all about reducing that.

Meanwhile the postmodern approach, including the SocJus descendents, do not take significant steps or often any steps to address what scientists are pointing at - the fact that reality exists external to human culture & discourses & needs taking into account.

So, if you hear a postmodernist saying that science thinks it already has objective knowledge, you can know that they are misrepresenting science which has at its core a system that holds that knowledge is always provisional & hypotheses can only ever be falsified, not proven.

Meanwhile, if you hear anyone say that postmodernists do not believe an objective reality to exist, you can know that this is not literally true but what they actually do believe manifests so similarly to this in practice that it is a distinction without a difference.