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 | Mathenatics is an example of a priori knowledge by way of empirical and praxeological suggestions. | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Lean toward: nominalism | Or better: conceptualism. | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept: objective | They are constituted by objective relations with a living being which has enough freedom to enjoy the way in which things present themselves. | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: yes | Analytic: analysis of concepts formed on behalf of experience. | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | Ecological externalism with enough room for meaning internalism. | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: non-skeptical realism | That's a perspectival, relational and pragmatic realism, which includes aesthetic and moral qualities. | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept: compatibilism | Freedom is not so much a matter of the will (if there is such a single thing) as of thought and feeling. | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | Religious atheism, so God may help us. | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept an intermediate view | Empirical control of rational thought. | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Accept: contextualism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Lean toward: non-Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Accept both | Logical pluralism is a good position. Changes of logical perspectives are important, and I find classicists' self-satisfaction deplorable. | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept both | External reference with commentaries by means of internally available concepts. | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral realism | In accordance with relational realism. | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Lean toward: naturalism | Ecological, not physicalist naturalism. | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept: non-physicalism | If we are speaking about mind and evaluate thoughts and desires, we are speaking in non-physical terms. If we are speaking about neural processing (and eventually care about how to improve it) we are thinking about a physical process. | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | Emotional cognitivism. | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept both | We cannot separate internal arousal and external appeal, nor can we separate reasoning and sentiment. | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept more than one | We need deontology, care for virtue, and, of course, care for consequences. | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Lean toward: disjunctivism | | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept more than one | I prefer not too much identity. | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Reject all | Accept only fairness and common care. | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Lean toward: Millian | Stressing the demonstrative component and also an implicit conceptual one: by 'John' I mean the man and not the second botton of his shirt. | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept an intermediate view | Scientific descriptions are not more (nor less) realistic than everyday descriptions | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Accept: death | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Lean toward: B-theory | The difficult thing is how to explain 'before' and 'after', so we may need also a praxeological A-theory as a complement | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Agnostic/undecided | Moral theory must not have in offer a ready-made answer to every possible question. | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Accept: correspondence | We should not have qualms about correspondence. We respond to reality, and mappings and matchings, paradigms of correspondence, are at least in first instance a good simile of knowledge. | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Lean toward: inconceivable | But to some degree we are all kind of zombies, and not of the smartest ones. See the first lines of Emerson's "Experience". | |