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? | Accept: yes | And lots of it! | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Lean toward: Platonism | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept both | Both exists. VERY roughly: what makes us merry is subjective; what inspires awe is objective - yet not necessarily the same for each of us (not uniform). A real explanation would not fit in this margin.. | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Accept: yes | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Other | I don't quite understand the terms. Some beliefs are given bij God and properly basic; others follow from other beliefs, and others again from beliefs plus experience. | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Lean toward: non-skeptical realism | The world is there insofar God thinks it, and we have a priori knowledge of its existence. | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept: libertarianism | | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: theism | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept: rationalism | We have quite a bit of a priori knowledge, including knowledge that allows us to accept sense data as informative of the external world. | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Accept: non-Humean | Again, a law exists if it is God's intention. We can discover the law because we have a priori knowledge of the low information content of the world - so the shortest description is the most likely. | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Accept an intermediate view | Something akin to intuitionism: the finiteness of our world leads to infinite information content - if everything were computable no need for Gödel-like axioms would be necessary. God lives beyond this limit and has absolute truth, but we can't get at that (by rational means, at least, and never at all of it). | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: internalism | All that is really needed is, again, God's intention. Is a transcendent being external? Nothing immanent and external is needed. | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Accept: non-naturalism | Taking naturalism to contradict transcendentalism. | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept: non-physicalism | | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept: internalism | Hope I understand this one. The world has a "moral arrow", part of creation. We have a priori knowledge of that fact, and an inclination to follow the arrow. Other inclinations may and will couter that wish, of course. | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Accept: one box | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Lean toward: deontology | On the absolute level. We may not know moral laws in their exact form (just as we don't know scientific laws in their final form), so in practice virtue ethics may result when my ethical intuition transcends the laws as I know them. | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | I know what I believe on this, but haven't read enough to know what some of the terms above mean. | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Reject one, undecided between others | Again, I don't know quite what the terms mean. Identity follows, not surprisingly, from God's intention - see the teleport question. | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Lean toward: egalitarianism | Egalitarianism = treating people as of equal worth. The individual is definitely worth more than the state, but the state may infringe on liberty to avoid prisoners' dilemmas. | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept: scientific realism | Based on our a priori knowledge of the low information content of our world, and assuming science means finding the shortest explantion of things. (And that realism implies knowing that further research will probably yield ever refined theories - possibly forever.) | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Accept another alternative | Identity follows from God's intention. If God means the teleported person to be the same, it is. Otherwise, not. | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Lean toward: B-theory | I suppose that means the B-series is primary. God being "outside time", we are dreamt "at once" (wrong term) at each moment, and at each moment we have a different A-series. | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Lean toward: don't switch | Now if probabilities get involved it becomes a different matter, and they always do, of course. | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Lean toward: correspondence | Both truth and reality follow from God's intention (like dream truth and reality from the intention of the dreamer). Insofar there is a single intention truth and reality correspond. | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Accept: metaphysically possible | | |