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? | Agnostic/undecided | It hinges heavily on what would count as a priori knowledge. That's almost more of a debate than simply whether there is a priori knowledge. | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Accept another alternative | What happened to conceptualism and the like? | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept: subjective | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: no | However, there's obviously such a distinction in practice. The question is if the distinction is what we THOUGHT it was pre-Two Dogmas, and if it can do the work many philosophers want it to, in which case I answer no. | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept another alternative | The realism/anti-realism distinction rests on an untenable form of representationalism. | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept: compatibilism | | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept another alternative | Pragmatism | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Lean toward: contextualism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Accept another alternative | Pluralism | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: externalism | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Agnostic/undecided | I'm suspicious of how important the question is for the sort of normative reasoning we engage in though. Moderate realisms and moderate anti-realisms are closer to each other than the views they are putative moderations of (e.g. Divine Command Theory or Error Theory for the extremes). | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Lean toward: naturalism | The only reason I'm hesitant to embrace the term "naturalist" is not because I wouldn't find the positions of most self-identified naturalists much more agreeable than those of their opponents -I do- but because I'm not sure "naturalism" picks out anything useful. It seems to me that naturalism can either be interpreted in a very strong, scientistic fashion (Rosenberg, Stich, Kornblith, etc.) in which case I don't think it's tenable, but most broader uses of "naturalism" outside of specific contexts seem to be SO broad as to be useless. | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept: physicalism | Only in the (what I consider trivial) sense that what we usually call "the mental" is subject to the same causal constraints as everything else, i.e. isn't supernatural. I don't think there's any sense in which the descriptions of, say, neurology or cognitive science are in any sense more "accurate" or privileged than the descriptions/vocabularies of, say, psychology or literature. | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Agnostic/undecided | I'm not sure one should presuppose the description in the first place, given that the understanding of a knowledge claim usually employed in cognitivist accounts is not itself tenable in my view. | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | There is no fact of the matter | The "correct" decision-theoretic answer is two, but I think that's more a point against decision theory as a generalized model of rationality than anything else (provided we reject retrocausality). | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Reject all | Particularism. We don't need a first-order "moral theory." | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Reject one or two, undecided between others | | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept more than one | Combination of psychological and biological, but it's a practical rather than ontological question. | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Accept more than one | I think liberalism, properly understood, has elements of all three broad "families" of political thinking, and I am a liberal. | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Lean toward: Fregean | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Lean toward: scientific anti-realism | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Accept: death | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Lean toward: A-theory | | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Accept: switch | | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Accept: deflationary | Combined with epistemic (warranted assertability). "Truth" itself is unanalyzable/redundant in a Ramsey/Davidson vein, but the employment OF "truth" tracks warranted assertability. There is a difference between saying truth IS warranted assertability, and that there is nothing to JUDGING WHETHER A CLAIM IS TRUE EXCEPT warranted assertability. | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Lean toward: inconceivable | I'm very skeptical of modal metaphysics as it is, but there's a great quip, the source of which sadly escapes me at the moment, about "conceiving" of a unicorn and then being asked how many stomachs it has. | |