Profile for Roland Nadler

My philosophical views

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.

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Question	Answer	Comments
A priori knowledge: yes or no?	Lean toward: no	Seems to me like a moot question in our contemporary era of genetics, neuroscience, et cetera. Clearly there's innate knowledge-like ability and robust sets of intuitions, but to call this "a priori knowledge" seems like an unnecessary semantic contortion. So much so that I lean toward there being "no such thing."
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?	Insufficiently familiar with the issue	I'm very strongly anti-Platonist in all my thinking. However I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable/interested in this area of philosophy to endorse nominalism or another position.
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?	Accept: subjective	When you've got a minority view on what's beautiful, as I do, subjectivism comes pretty easily. I'm just not going to accept that I'm systematically mistaken (or even more unlikely, that most other people are) about something like this.
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?	Lean toward: no	It was always an intuitive distinction to me until I read Two Dogmas. At which point I was like, "well Quine, you talked me out of it. I'm okay with that." It's not a stance I will defend with great passion, but it seems correct.
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?	Lean toward: internalism	I tend to be an internalist about everything for which the question can be posed. I do think that the debate over epistemic justification is, as the ordinary language philosophers would say, a linguistic dispute and not a real one.
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?	Accept an intermediate view	The predicate "real" as we try to apply it to "the external world" seems to me utterly drained of any meaning whatsoever. The external world skeptic will quickly, through unfortunate encounters with the supposedly non-real world, realize that he was setting too high a bar on what counts as "real." Anyhow, the existence of an external world strikes me as the most parsimonious explanation of the reports of sensory experience, and I like reasoning abductively, so yeah.
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?	Accept: no free will	Libertarianism seems to me not only false but impossible (and impossible to articulate a coherent conception of). Compatibilism strikes me as a grand mal philosophical cop-out that misses our reasons for seeing free will as a problem in the first place. Determinism is true and it rules out free will, but this is not the kind of fact we can ever fully internalize and "live out." It's incompatible with our psychology.
God: theism or atheism?	There is no fact of the matter	I generally tend to think that questions of theism and atheism are spuriously posed as empirical questions (even if disguised otherwise), and shouldn't be. I think however that it is fairly clear that it's wise to organize our worldly endeavors on non-theistic principles.
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?	Reject both	This is really no longer a question for philosophy. Considering the empirical picture that has emerged, it's difficult to conclude that rationalism, as conceived by say Descartes or Leibniz, is anything but flat-out wrong. Empiricism gives a better account of how we come to acquire some kinds of knowledge, but it overreaches massively and ends up being contradicted in many places by our understanding of human cognitive development.
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?	Insufficiently familiar with the issue
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?	The question is too unclear to answer	Are we talking about necessitarianism versus regularity? I guess I incline slightly toward the former but I'm otherwise naive to the issue.
Logic: classical or non-classical?	Insufficiently familiar with the issue	No feelings either way.
Mental content: internalism or externalism?	Accept: internalism	Probably a minority position, but I'm a hardcore internalist about pretty much everything. Externalism about content and especially about intentionality may be intuitive, but I think it brazenly flouts all ontological respectability. I'm always surprised when otherwise naturalistic philosophers espouse it.
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?	Accept: moral anti-realism	Show me a moral fact and I'll show you the corner of a circle. See Joshua Greene's dissertation. On the other hand, there are absolutely facts about what's "morally conventional" within a particular cultural context.
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?	Lean toward: naturalism	I'm not dogmatic about naturalism but I tend to think that philosophy runs a lot smoother when naturalism is a general "default" mode of inquiry, to be suspended only for certain kinds of questioning.
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?	Lean toward: physicalism	Almost chose "question too unclear." I'm a substance monist, and I think we might as well call that substance physical. There are many different kinds of properties (physical, chemical, biological, mental, so on) and it seems to me that they "hang together" by force of some rather stable lawlike relationships. The mind is a program run by the brain - computational analogy very much intended.
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?	Accept: non-cognitivism	Blackburn's projectivism strikes me as a nice characterization of what goes on.
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism?	Accept: internalism	Consistent with my internalism about other things, and non-cognitivism. (Right?)
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes?	Accept: one box	Pure intuition here. My immediate leaning is "duh, of course you take Box B, and ex hypothesi the predictor knows it."
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?	There is no fact of the matter	To me, the inadequacies of virtue ethics and deontology feel more pervasive than those of consequentialism, though to be sure, it founders on some cases too. I just don't like the idea that we need a "grand unified moral theory." We can characterize "what works out best for everyone," "acts we feel squeamish about," and "the kinds of people we want to be," and accept that there's no further contextually-invariant fact of the matter about how to reconcile those.
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?	Insufficiently familiar with the issue	Still need to learn more about this. Whatever jibes best with neuroscience - that's my tentative answer.
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?	Reject all	Personal identity is not any kind of fact at all. It's a convenient (and psychologically necessary) projection (c.f. projectivism in ethics) we superimpose on the factual makeup of the world. As it happens, the same is true of a lot of what we take to be philosophically problematic concepts.
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?	Accept more than one	Where justice, and not mere closed-mindedness, can trump liberty, I like to think it should; however the risk of foisting our prejudices on the outgroup in the name of the political good is so terrible that we must tread very carefully. Although I'm a serious Rawls fan, I think there's ultimately no further fact about which of these positions is "the right one"; we need to consider all three in order to build agreeable societies.
Proper names: Fregean or Millian?	Lean toward: Fregean	No strong intuitions here. Frege's characterization seems nice. I'm not on board with Kripke at any rate, so I feel okay inclining this way, though I like Russellian stuff better than the old essentializing connotation-denotation bit.
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?	Accept another alternative	Pragmatism (Dewey) and instrumentalism. Which may not really answer the question ... I think "exists" as a predicate of theoretical entities, is rather drained of meaning. Fine, say they don't exist, I'm not too concerned as long as we have highly predictive theories about everything.
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?	There is no fact of the matter	It's basically a semantic decision whether we call it life or death, and it does demand consistency; I'm inclined to say that the teletransporter is not that different a case from being knocked unconscious or even going to sleep.
Time: A-theory or B-theory?	Insufficiently familiar with the issue	Strikes me as a bit of a tempest in a teapot, but I'm sure the same is said by others of what I think are the most important philosophical questions.
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch?	Lean toward: switch	Utilitarianism wins in any case as far as which choice works out for everybody. Even if it's one's own mother on the side track. I do think there's a further question of whether it always matters most to us to do what is best for everybody, and fruitful discussion to be had about where to go from there.
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?	Accept another alternative	Pragmatism. As in, Peirce-James-Dewey(-Rorty? -Putnam?) American pragmatism. To the extent that it differs from the deflationary view, which I suspect it does.
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?	Accept: inconceivable	Saying you've clearly and distinctly conceived of a zombie is like saying you've clearly and distinctly conceived of the scene depicted in an Escher painting. I'm with Dennett - postulate my zombie and all you've done is postulate me.

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