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 | | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Lean toward: Platonism | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Lean toward: objective | with the proviso that the objective standards are relative to some genre, say surrealism. | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: yes | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: skepticism | when i am doing epistemology, i recognize the pull of skepticism, but i put it aside in order to anything philosophical or otherwise. either way, the world appears to me thus and so, and i can't tell if it isn't thus and so. so i might as well act as if it is. | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept more than one | i accept a hard determinist definition of no free will while also accepting what i think is misleadingly called compatibibilism as it equivocates on "free will". but it's good enough. | |
God: theism or atheism? | Other | Both theism and atheism have (lack) the same kind of important evidence which requires believers of either view to do so on the basis of faith. I take it the atheist is not going to be happy about this. though it does depend on what kinds of things one counts as good evidence. i remain agnostic until i can get some better evidence. | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept both | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Accept more than one | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Accept: Humean | provided that the correct interpretation of Hume is being offered. | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Accept both | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept both | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Agnostic/undecided | At the moment, I lean toward naturalism, but I don't feel I've spent enough time examining non-naturalist approaches. | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept both | I accept the possibility that one or the other is correct, but have not ruled either one out. | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Lean toward: cognitivism | i am a moral particularist and moral realist. if there is a cognitivist version realist enough to support that, then i accept it. | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Other | I accept moral particularism, which is close, but not identical, to virtue ethics. | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Accept: qualia theory | | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | The question is too unclear to answer | the question of personal identity is raised in a cluster of different contexts, each of which points to one or more of these candidates as salient depending on the question we are asking and the context we are asking the question in. moreover, these three candidates are not an exhaustive list of what kinds of things personal identity "is", "consists in", "is in virtue of", allows us to reidentify others, and so on. | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Accept another alternative | i have given this matter a lot of thought and find myself less decisive than i was when i began. any of these theories on their own won't work. there needs to be some sort of combination of theories, though i haven't time to go into that here. | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Lean toward: Fregean | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | The question is too unclear to answer | it makes a big differenc how the terms 'realism' and 'anti-realism' are defined, and that difference is what locates me on the map. i am sympathetic to both. | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Lean toward: death | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Accept: B-theory | | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | The question is too unclear to answer | We need more information about who these people are before deciding whether to switch or not. If by some fluke, the one on the side track is a scientist who just descovered the cure for cancer (standard and somewhat lame example, i know) and was on her way to the lab to write down the info as opposed to 5 senior, and senile, citizens on a walking tour, then don't pull the switch. and so on. | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Accept more than one | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Accept: metaphysically possible | | |