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: no | Though this depends on how 'experience' is being defined, but ultimately: nothing in the mind that has not been derived from the senses | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Accept: nominalism | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Reject both | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: no | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept an intermediate view | Perhaps a socio-pragmatic correspondence? | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Reject one, undecided between others | Rejection of idealism leaving a dynamic and pragmatic balance between realism and skepticism | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Lean toward: no free will | BUT, this is not to imply any form of determinism (damn, used one myself)- more a individualised self-organisation of probable responses to a limited number possible options | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept both | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Other | What is it with all these 'isms'? The closest I could suggest would be a pragmatic mapping of a complex and dynamic 'world'. | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Lean toward: Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Reject both | In fact reject formal logic...sorry. | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Reject both | Are there going to be many more binary oppositions rounded off with a nice 'ism'...if only life were that simple! | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Lean toward: moral anti-realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Lean toward: naturalism | | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Lean toward: physicalism | | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Reject both | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept both | In as much as there are social and biological factors that are self-organised as part of 'the self' | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | There is no fact of the matter | | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Reject all | | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept more than one | I lean towards the view of personal identity & selfhood being an emergent psychological phenomenon - emergent from the biological. | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Lean toward: scientific realism | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Reject both | | |
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 | Whilst the question frames the problem an actual response would take into account all the factors occuring at the time, not just the 'clinical' ones given here. | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Lean toward: correspondence | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Accept: inconceivable | | |