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? | Lean toward: no | We do have innate dispositions that can lead to successful action if that's what one means. | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept another alternative | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Accept: no | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept both | each tracks a different but, in principle, coherent notion of what it means to have justification | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept another alternative | I am naturalist and falliblist on such questions. | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept: compatibilism | | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | unless one plays around with the definition of god. | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Lean toward: empiricism | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Accept another alternative | Each sort of account tracks different intuitions we have about how knowledge works. There is not one canonical account since the intuitions that support such alternative theories are incoherent. | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Accept another alternative | whatever our best physical theories suggest, and this is revisable | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Accept both | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept another alternative | whatever our best natural account of cognition suggest, and this is always revisable. | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept another alternative | most moral judgment is conventional. | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Accept: naturalism | | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept: physicalism | | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | There is no fact of the matter | This depends entirely on one's background assumptions. | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept another alternative | | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Accept another alternative | I am a pluralist here too. Each account captures some philosophical intuitions and misses others. Why suppose there is only one faithful account of experience? | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept another alternative | All of the above and more---each account tracks a different sort of identity. | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Lean toward: libertarianism | | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | The question is too unclear to answer | argh. | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept: scientific realism | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Accept another alternative | whatever our best physical theories suggest, and this is revisable | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | There is no fact of the matter | | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Accept: epistemic | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |