No, the claim is that you cannot have context-free universally true premises for every type discussion.

Most of this discussion outrage is based on people on all sides not realising they start from different, inherently subjective premises, and then believe they can build a universally true objective claim on that card house.

EDIT: This is why I believe people in STEM fields would really benefit from spending some time learning about the qualitative sciences and the philosophy of science it builds on. Because unlike physics or maths it is not based on the often implicit notion of an objective external truth - it cannot be. In some ways it is much more challenging to do good science it in.

To me, appeals to "rational discussion" represent an unwillingness to accept that humans are messy, irrational creatures, and that rationality itself is but a tool, not an end-goal (and by extension, a denial of one's own irrationality). We're not modelling our society on Skinner-boxes for a reason.

> No, the claim is that you cannot have context-free universally true premises for every type discussion.

A core part of "rational discussion" (as I understand it) is separating premises from arguments, so that when someone comes to a conclusion you disagree with, you point out whether you disagree with the premises or the argument (or both) and then you can go into more detail to pinpoint where exactly the disagreement comes from.

The statement "Because Jews are possessed by mind-eating demons from Xzdrgs, the Holocaust was justified." is probably both too absurd in its premise and too abhorrent in its conclusion to warrant serious consideration, and yet if someone wanted to engage it in a rational discussion, they could do so, e.g. by stating that mind-eating demons from Xzdrgs don't exist or that assuming they did exist, you couldn't defeat them by killing the host, or any number of other arguments. Those arguments themselves are then subject to counterclaims based in the same principles of rational discussion, and so on.

Now I wonder whether you could turn "absurdist rational discussion" into a game and whether it would be any fun to play.

> No, the suggestion is that you cannot have context-free universally true premises for every type discussion.

This is not a prerequisite of all discussions.

> Most of this discussion outrage is based on people on all sides not realising they start from different, inherently subjective premises, and then believe they can build a universally true objective claim on that card house.

This is easy to discover and correct for if both parties approach the discussion without being disingenuous. Building a universally true objective claim is not the only possible end goal of discussion.

> This is not a prerequisite of all discussions.

You're literally reversing your position here:

> Are you suggesting that some topics can only be discussed if

We were not talking about all discussions, we were talking about how some topics don't play nice with this method of having a discussion.

> This is easy to discover and correct for if both parties approach the discussion without being disingenuous.

You mean like not pretending you were talking about the opposite thing you were actually talking about one comment ago?

I'm not reversing my position at all. I am arguing that some topics can be discussed with context-free universally true premises and some cannot. Nothing I have said is inconsistent with that.

> This is not a prerequisite of all discussions.

is equivalent to:

Some discussions do not have this as a prerequisite.

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.

So which "objective" truth do you think has been discarded in all of this? Be rigorous.

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.

>To me, appeals to "rational discussion" represent an unwillingness to accept that humans are messy, irrational creatures, and that rationality itself is but a tool, not an end-goal (and by extension, a denial of one's own irrationality). We're not modelling our society on Skinner-boxes for a reason.

Whoever told you Skinner-boxes were the end-point of rationality was... deeply wrong, and probably doing such damage to public discussion that they should be reprimanded.

> the claim is that you cannot have context-free universally true premises for every type discussion

Thankyou, this is exactly what I meant.