But things like "you can't wake up yesterday" are tautologies. That's what we decided that "yesterday" means. And things like "fire consumes" are knowable by examination.

The author is talking about things which require interpretation. And as much as we would like to believe that we have the correct, or at least the most correct, interpretation of these things, there's really very little reason to believe that this is the case.

We build devices to investigate things based on what we believe we will find. So, it's hardly surprising that they tend to confirm our suspicions, is it? We believe in atoms and vacuums not so much because of Dalton and Einstein, as because of Epicurus, who planted that idea in our culture two thousand years ago. So, now we believe in photons and bosons, and build super-colliders to confirm their existence, even though we still can't see what's going on for ourselves.

We listen to scientists theorize about wormholes and multiple universes that come straight out of the B-grade science-ficiton movies they watched as kids and nod our heads because they're scientists, and we all know science is the one true way to understand everything, just as other cultures knew that religion, or history, or narratives, or experience, or philosophy was.

I don't think we we understand better than any other culture has, we just understand differently, and our own biases will ensure that we think of our understandings as better whether there's any real reason to believe so or not.