I'm surprised at that, or maybe I'm just incredibly cynical about politics. I hate both parties and most politicians.

and the Democrats are against the confirmation because they believe that he's guilty. — Michael

You really think the Democrats are against the confirmation for that reason? They don't want him because of how he might vote as Supreme Court justice. This is just a way for them to try and prevent it, or at least make the Republicans look bad and gain seats in the midterms.

This is all political, as far as the two parties are concerned. To think otherwise is naive.

Republicans don't want to investigate because of the time it would take. If Democrats take the Senate in November, they'll leave the Supreme Court seat vacant hoping to win the presidency in 2020.

This is why the Democrats dragged their feet on even having a hearing until yesterday. — frank

I really wish the Judicial branch was entirely independent from all the politics of the other two branches, but I guess that's part of the checks and balances.

Still, it bothers me that Supreme Court judges are often nominated according to how the ruling party in power thinks they will rule on certain issues.

And, as a writer for The Guardian put it recently, particularly in response to the reaction of many women to the Kavanaugh controversy, Republicans have galvanized a backlash that will have profound electoral consequences. — S

That depends on whether the backlash is amongst swing voters or people who would have otherwise stayed home. It doesn't help if it's just those of us who voted against Trump.

Also, two years is a long time to remain the same outrage in today's world, although Trump is admittedly good at keeping the flame burning. More likely the backlash would occur at midterms in the House and Senate.

The Democrats need to nominate someone who motivates people like Obama or Bernie to want to care about voting. Too many people saw Hillary as more of the same. The Republican candidates ran into the same problem against Trump. They were either seen as insiders, or lacked the personality to carry a movement.

Also, It's hard to put much stock in what people predict about future elections, given how almost nobody thought Trump could win. It was such a shocker.

But finding out that your assailant has been nominated to the Supreme Court is [clearly sufficient motivation to speak out. — Michael

Could also be that he might be instrumental in overturning Roe v Wade if he's nominated. But there are other accusations, so ...

whether the words themselves have inherent meaning — MindForged

To quote MCU Thor: "All words are made up."

"The Democrats are working hard to destroy a wonderful man, and a man who has the potential to be one of our greatest Supreme Court Justices ever, with an array of False Acquisitions the likes of which have never been seen before!" — Pierre-Normand

What a freaking drama queen. Everything is either the best or worst ever for Trump. He gets to appoint another judge if Kavanaugh is "destroyed".

Nothing about "red" inherently makes the mind conjure up a particular range of colors, just ask a pacific islander who doesn't speak a lick of English. — MindForged

Right, using 'red' to denote a color is arbitrary, but the debate is over whether words have an internal meaning in the head of speakers, or the meaning is from the language use in a community, and thus external. Therefore, the beetle in the box we can't talk about, and the impossibility of private language.

The way to get to the facts is to look for them. The Republicans don't want to do that. Therein lies the problem. — Baden

Fair enough.

But that's not necessarily the victim's fault. And that's where we need to disentangle things and be careful how we approach the issue. — Baden

Agreed. That's up to each senator.

No, that's not the way it works. Eye-witness testimony is evidence. — Baden

It is, but I question whether humans are reliable enough to count it as evidence. There have been cases of picking the wrong person out of a lineup, or remembering the wrong face where a person gets convicted, and is later exonerated by DNA.

The Steven Avery rape case is one famous one. Another involved a man driving home with his fiancee who looked like the perp and was picked out of a lineup. The accuser became convinced it was him, and he was convicted. Years later, an investigator tracked down the actual culprit and got a confession out of him. The case got overturned.

There was also the whole false memory thing with the recovered memory therapy that was big in the wild 80s and 90s Satanic Ritual Abuse cases.

If your rhetorical point is the conspiracy theory angle, that's been dealt with several times already in this thread. — Baden

Calling it a conspiracy theory makes it sound like politics doesn't involve attempts to smear people or dig up skeletons to prevent them from taking office.

And how it's been dealt in this thread doesn't change my sense that the accusation is being used politically. How do you think the Senate vote will go? Democrats against, Republicans for?

^ Those two questions are rhetorical.

You're wasting everyone's time here if you don't even know for sure what age he was when this happened or the circumstances surrounding how the accusations were released and the background to that. — Baden

Those questions were rhetorical. The one that wasn't was about statistics involving controversial political positions.

And you'll find the answers. — Baden

I doubt that. From what I've read and heard so far, opinion tends to break along political lines.

But I'll agree with the posters who said each Senator should weigh the testimony of both and the available evidence, for what it is, and come to a decision.

This paper gives a 5.9% false reporting rate for the US. — Baden

But what's the probability when a big political decision is at play? Why is it that accusations come out right before someone controversial is about to be elected or appointed? Isn't this accusation from decades ago when he was 17?

I'm not sure that's enough to bar his nomination. Seems to me there are better, more recent reasons to oppose the nomination. Maybe Ford is telling the truth, but the Democrats are definitely using it for political reasons (not that the Republicans are above that either).

Apart from Meta, is there anyone willing to defend the notion of words having essential meanings? — Banno

I don't think the meanings of words is exclusively in their usage to the extent that we can ignore what the brain is doing cognitively. There's an cognitive component to meaning which makes the usage possible. I don't know about the essential part, since language is fluid and evolves. But if you tell me a word, it does cause mental activity in me.

"How could it?" How could it not? It's not indefinite, the members of the "set of natural numbers" never increases or decreases, it is exactly what it is and has always been. — MindForged

Well, I'm not sure that's quite the case under intuitionism, where infinity is only a potential, and the only natural numbers that exist are the ones which have been stated, written down or computed.

If that's so, then under one philosophy of math, natural numbers can be added over time, in a sense that they go from potential to actual. Otherwise, one might be seen as committed to the reality of infinities and numbers we haven't constructed yet.

Some of the reading I've been doing that somewhat inspired my thread has been precisely on the link between gesture and math, and the fact that math is unthinkable without gesture. — StreetlightX

Depends on whether one believes computers can think, or whether it would require a robot for a machine to understand math. Humans learn math because of gesturing, but that doesn't mean math has to be learnt that way. Maybe that's just the ape way.

Insofar as all language is normative, so too is math: it does not reflect some other-worldly eternal reality. — StreetlightX

No, but it does reflect the countability of the world, and possibly more.

In the movie (and book) Contact, SETI detects an alien signal because it's broadcasting a repeating sequence of prime numbers from 1 to 101. The idea being that math is universal. Also, the aliens have broadcasted at the frequency of hydrogen times PI, which combines basic chemistry with basic math, which is a frequency SETI actually listens to, and one Sagan came up with when writing the book. Any alien civilization capable of broadcasting a radio signal will also know chemistry, since they live in the same universe.

As such, the assumption is that basic math and science are universal among any technological species, otherwise, they wouldn't be capable of sending or listening for radio signals.

If an alien can broadcast, then it understands "PI".

I think one could make a persuasive argument that the concept two the english word "two" denotes is an essential meaning, since there is going to be the idea of two in any language, since there are distinct countable things in the world, and it's very useful to be able to say that.

If a lion could talk, it would say that a gazelle in the mouth is worth more than two in the grass.

The only reason for being an atheist is because you don't believe in any gods. That's it. There's no merit or value. It just is. One might feel good about being intellectually honest, or not having to go to Church, Temple, etc. But really it's just lacking belief for whatever reason.

How could that mutual dependency make sense? I see how we need the universe, but how does it need us or the "I"? — Twain

The universe doesn't need us. We're born, humans evolved, space is vast, life inhabits all sorts of habitats we don't. Also, we depend on things like air, food, water, the right temperature range and what not to survive.

So unless one thinks all of that is merely an appearance in the mind, the universe doesn't need us.

What is the argument for possible worlds? It sounds a bit crazy, but I would need to see the argument.

And scoffing is very important to us. I like to scoff. Sometimes it turns into a scoffing fit. Great word that, scoff. — Bitter Crank

Sounds like the start a new school of of philosophy.

Is that the only option? God or Positivism? — Banno

God as a positivist idealist.

If I want to know what you felt like, I am always going to be using my experiences. That's the entire point. — TheWillowOfDarkness

And your experiences are unlikely to ever be exactly the same as mine.

If I think concepts reflective of the content of your dream, I'll know it. — TheWillowOfDarkness

You can't know that it was my dream, or even a dream, without me telling you. And this also depends on the extent that concepts are capable of faithfully reproducing experiences.

So, I would say we do ultimately get all those things from observing 'external' nature; and this of course in conjunction with observing the nature of our mental processes; which are also surely part of nature, properly conceived. — Janus

Sure, mental process are part of nature. The problem here is that mental processes can be about things that are not part of nature. Our understanding of the world can have mistaken notions. Our experience of the world can be mistaken. It's clear that problems arise between language and the world. Simon Blackburn called it a "loose fit" between mind and world. What constitutes identity? When is something a pile? Can you have non-simple objects? Are forms required for knowledge? Does time flow? Do we look out on the world perceiving things as they are? And so on.

I think it is a mistake to think that there is any subject-object split in reality. The only split is mental or logical. — Dfpolis

However we wish to categorize the matter, even in reality there is a difference between subject perceptions of the world, and subject-generated experiences independent of perception. Dreams exist in the real world, but they are still different from perception.

You can relate to what it feels like to be me. Exist with the right experiences, you"ll feel the same. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yeah, but I don't exist as you, so I don't have the same experiences.

To know your dreams, like anything, I just need the right concept. I could know what you dreamt without you even speaking to me. All I would need is to have the right experiences, to exist knowing the concepts which reflected your dreams. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But you can't know this without being told.

I can know what someone experienced in the sense of "what it felt like." — TheWillowOfDarkness

There are limits. I can't know what it's like to give birth, since I don't have the right kind of body for that, and no concept is going to allow me to have that exact experience. I also don't know what it's like to be blind from birth. It gets worse as we go from the differences between humans to other animals.

But you do raise a good point about language allowing us to have the same or similar experiences, within certain limitations.

Good rebuttal, but I think it confuses the process with the conceptual apparatus that makes it possible.

We don't get numbers, operations or equations from observing nature. Two, plus and equals don't exist as objects anymore than a perfect circle or PI does.

We create symbols to express the ideas they represent. And we write these down or use tools like calculators because it's difficult for us to do complicated math and logic in our heads.

We also developed concepts like infinity, hyperspace, or counterfactuals. These don't come from sense data.

I don't see a genuine divide between the deductive and the empirical. — Janus

We don't learn about logic or math from observing the world. They developed out of our conceptual reasoning. As such, they are a priori. Empirical knowledge is a posteriori. This has been recognized since at least Plato, even if it was put in different terms.

Btw it speaks to the victory of materialism/atomism/ reductionism that our direct experiences can be considered spooky when they are still our access point to the world. — JupiterJess

That's a good point. However, the subjective/objective split still leaves transcendental idealism on the table.

I think eliminativism could mean that the folk terms used to describe our experiences aren't suited to a laboratory because they are rough stereotypes/social constructs. — JupiterJess

I'm sympathetic to that. Notice that in these cases ordinary word use is based on faulty assumptions, and so getting clear would actually mean eliminating terms.

However, the laboratory settings is still objective, regardless of what better terms we come up with to use in place of the folk ones.

And from reading and hearing enough of philosophers like Dennett, it's clear that the goal is to eliminate the subjective as a real category, which is a lot stronger than replacing words.

One could say that the philosophical work is exactly in sorting out how we want to denote this or that -- in your example, the acceptable boundaries of use for the words "objective" and "subjective", or whether these or other terms are better. After all, what in the split needs resolving? What would it mean to resolve the split? Aren't the words "objective" and "subjective" simply being put to use, and insofar that we agree on their usage we have nothing more philosophical to talk about? — Moliere

Sure. Linguistic analysis would be good for that. We might want to get rid of "in here" and "out there" in philosophical language because it can be misleading. Replace it with something better. Maybe point that the container idea of mind is also misleading. Or whatever. Maybe we don't know how to think properly about how the mind interacts with the world, and linguistic analysis can point that out. Also, ongoing research in science can help clear things up. But it doesn't make the subjective and objective distinction disappear.

but it would seem that the "in here" isentirely public. Just as we know about the tree in our backyard, it would seem we can know when subjective experiences exists and their character. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I don't know how experiences can be entirely public. I have to tell you about my dreams or inner dialog for you to know anything about them. Unlike the tree in the backyard, you can't just go look.

what is the status of your experiences and language use? Are these merely "subjective" such that they have no objective important? Are we prevented form saying it is true you are experiencing something else? More to the point, how does anything we might talk about, which is a "something of our experience" true if our subjectivities don't constitute something which is true and can said to report truth? — TheWillowOfDarkness

We're able to express our subjectivity in language, to an extent. I can't relate to you exactly what it feels like to be me, but since you're human and we probably share a similar enough culture, then you can relate in a lot of ways.

Of course this is a rhetorical device. But to me the device in this context does appeal to a commonality of experience even as it insists that one's own is unique. There's something paradoxical going on. Your words propose that I will understand what you're proposing because I will experience things that way too. And I do! — mcdoodle

Right, and I'm not a solipsist. We do understand a lot of each other's experiences. But not all. We also misunderstand. I don't know to what extent I can walk in someone else's shoes.

It becomes more difficult when we think about other animals. Thus the what it's like to be a bat question, and how difficult it is for us to figure out whether dolphins and whales really employ language.

I think it helps a lot that as humans, we have similar experiences, and can put that into language. We can also read each other pretty well.

It might better be captured by saying we are embedded in language. — Banno

Landru, is that you?

The process of doing math is an empirical one of working with symbols in accordance with strict rules, in order to discover previously unknown results so I count it as an empirical practice. — Janus

I thought empirical was perceptual. What you're talking about sounds deductive. Doesn't logic work the same way?

Math isn’t perceived. It’s conceptual. We can apply it to the empirical with great results, which raises interesting questions.

so-called analytic philosophy is firmly underpinned by empiricist assumptions which are themselves based on science and it's exclusion of the non-empirical

I’m not entirely sure this is true for science. Consider some of the speculative theories in physics, debates involving thought experiments, different interpretations of QM that physicists have come up with, the question of biological determinism vs contingency in evolution, and so on. Also, the widespread use of mathematics.

If science was exclusively empirical, we wouldn’t have theories. Unobservable entities like quarks wouldn’t be posited. There would be no laws or constants.