if you throw out the concept of objective truth (a staple of postmodern philosophy) then there is no debating at all, because the whole point of debate is to get to the truth at the heart of a matter. With postmodernism all you have is interest groups waging war on each other to pursue their own benefit.
This implies discarding how people feel about subjects, because feelings are inherently subjective.
It also leads you into certain kinds of blindness about gender, because of the search for objective metrics. You end up measuring less relevant things - chromosomes - rather than more relevant things - gender presentation and socialisation - simply because they're easier to measure.
> This implies discarding how people feel about subjects, because feelings are inherently subjective.
If you believe, as I do, that the nature of reality is an objective matter, and people's subjective feelings are part of this objective reality, then the following are true:
- That certain people feel a certain way is an objective matter.
- Why people feel a certain way is also an objective matter.
Both of these things can be either very difficult or impossible to determine (at present at least), but that's a separate issue - it's epistemological not ontological.
that's true, people will always have their own feelings towards subjects and we humans don't have the ability to cleanly separate our rationality from our emotions. However, denying an objective truth just because we find it hard to get to is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We have tools available to us to get to the truth (science, logic, reason, open debate, etc), and to discard these tools leaves us with nothing but subjectivity and tribalism.
if you lay out which viewpoints you think are both objective, true and need to be discarded then I'll tell you. At a guess, I think the idea of tabula rasa has proven to be untrue and there are biological roots to some gender differences.
