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 | Endorsing the claim does not amount to access to a transcendent reality, but to grasping the logical structures of and relationships between semantic categories | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Accept both | The terminology of 'abstract objects' is very unfortunate, strongly suggesting outright Platonic 'non-concrete substances', which I take to be absurd. Numbers, e.g., are akin to attributes; numbers are the numbers OF things; the number of legs on a spider is larger than the number of legs on a rabbit; the number of numbers is infinite. | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Lean toward: objective | supervenience, surely | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Accept: yes | Yes, Virginia, there are meanings. | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Lean toward: non-skeptical realism | I affirm realism outright. Unlike scepticism, realism is an ontic doctrine. | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | There are no good arguments for the existence of gods, one or many, and plenty of arguments against. | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Reject both | But moderate rationalism is much closer to the mark | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Accept: invariantism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Accept: non-Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: externalism | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | There are too many varieties of naturalism, and positivism is not dead yet. | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: externalism | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept more than one | | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | The question is too unclear to answer | But if representationalism means that perceptual experience is 'referential' or has objective content, then it is correct. | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept: biological view | | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Lean toward: egalitarianism | | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Lean toward: Fregean | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept: scientific realism | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Accept: death | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Lean toward: B-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? | Lean toward: deflationary | But Aristotelian correspondence is a virtual truism | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Lean toward: metaphysically possible | | |