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? | Reject both | I, as of yet, cannot draw a clear distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori. I am inclined to reject the distinction outright for anything other than heuristic purposes. | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Lean toward: 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 | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept an intermediate view | I take it that we are external world idealists, skeptics, or realists for the sake of some end. That is, I would hope that an external world skeptic wants to demonstrate the limits of our knowledge, and that will have some practical import.
As such, I think there are times when all of these views can be appropriate—as long as there are good reasons for taking on parts of those views for some purpose, and as long we aren't dogmatists about adopting parts of one view over the others. | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
God: theism or atheism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Lean toward: contextualism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Lean toward: classical | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
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? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | There is no fact of the matter | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept another alternative | For the foreseeable future, I accept a social-relational view of identity. | |
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? | Accept: scientific anti-realism | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Accept: death | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | There is no fact of the matter | | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Lean toward: switch | | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Lean toward: deflationary | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Agnostic/undecided | | |