The answers shown here are not necessarily the same provided as part of the 2009 PhilPapers Survey. These answers can be updated at any time.
Question | Answer | Comments | |
A priori knowledge: yes or no? | Lean toward: no | | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Lean toward: nominalism | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept: objective | If a realist account may be as loose as some social agreement of some reductive physical account, then yes, objective. | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: yes | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: externalism | Externalism in the causal sense, but very weakly. Internal mental states and other stuff can be causes, I think. And in that sense they are external. | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Lean toward: idealism | In the sense that there can be few justified, positive skeptical claims, non-skeptical. In the sense that traditional 'realism' implies a correspondence over a coherence, probably idealism, in the phenomenalist sense. | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Other | Depends on definition of free will. My answer is 'compatibilism' if the definition of 'free will' is the loose 'you may do want you want' formulation. But if your definition need be more robust (as mine is), then no free will. | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept another alternative | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Lean toward: empiricism | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Lean toward: contextualism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Lean toward: Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Lean toward: non-classical | Enjoy reading Priest's and McGee's arguments for a revision of classical logic and rejection of inferential rules such as modus ponens and disjunction and the problem of contradictions, but probably not worth the time. | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral anti-realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Lean toward: non-naturalism | | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept: physicalism | Physicalism but only in the weak functionalist way. Or possibly a revised version of anomolous monism, rejecting even a token-identity but maintaining the supervening of mental concepts. | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Lean toward: cognitivism | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Accept: one box | If the predictor truly CANNOT be wrong then it will have factored its own prediction, your own greed, and your own reasoning. Therefore, there are not 4 possible outcomes, only two (which are both conjunctions). Supposing you are a logical entity, these outcomes are: you choosing one box and the predictor having been correct (yielding the bigger amount), or you choosing both and the predictor being correct (and yielding the smaller amount). So always take one box. | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept another alternative | Social-evolutionary theory. Teleological social-relativism. | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Lean toward: representationalism | | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Lean toward: biological view | | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | There is no fact of the matter | | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Lean toward: Fregean | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept: scientific anti-realism | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Accept: death | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | The question is too unclear to answer | If the question is regarding McTaggart's A-SERIES and B-SERIES then probably neither. Relativity and space-time/string theory are too strong to deny (contingently - not a necessary truth). | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Lean toward: correspondence | Yes there are 'truth-makers'. But only a weak correspondence theory should be trusted - Tarski may have leant away, but a non-realist correspondence (denying 'absolute' truth due to the metaphysical implications of 'true' correspondence) is intuitively attractive. | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Accept: conceivable but not metaphysically possible | Sympathy for the functionalist case. Conceivable in a strange cartoon-like way. But for the zombies to do what they do is to be conscious (strong functionalism). | |