My philosophical views

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.

See also:

QuestionAnswerComments
A priori knowledge: yes or no?Agnostic/undecidedIt 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 alternativeWhat happened to conceptualism and the like?
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?Accept: subjective
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?Lean toward: noHowever, 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 alternativeThe 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 alternativePragmatism
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 alternativePluralism
Mental content: internalism or externalism?Lean toward: externalism
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?Agnostic/undecidedI'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: naturalismThe 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: physicalismOnly 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/undecidedI'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 matterThe "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 allParticularism. 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 oneCombination of psychological and biological, but it's a practical rather than ontological question.
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?Accept more than oneI 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: deflationaryCombined 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: inconceivableI'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.