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 | | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Accept: nominalism | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept: subjective | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Accept: yes | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: externalism | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: non-skeptical realism | | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Lean toward: libertarianism | | |
God: theism or atheism? | Lean toward: atheism | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Lean toward: empiricism | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Accept: contextualism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: externalism | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral anti-realism | It is hard to express what is meant by this claim exactly. I believe there might well be knowable moral facts, since they are probably facts about the relation in which acts or objects stand to contextually salient ends. These facts are even perfectly objective (in some relevant sense of the term). I am an antirealist only in the sense that I think the salience of moral ends is ultimately determined by subjective mental states, like desires. | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Accept: naturalism | | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Lean toward: physicalism | | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept an intermediate view | I think there is a sense in which sincere assertoric moral judgment is necessarily linked with motivation, but I do not believe it is a conceptual truth. I think the link is as follows: sincere moral judgments are indexed to ends to which the speaker is him/herself committed. But the proposition expressed by such judgments is simply about the relation in which some act or object stands to these ends. | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Lean toward: deontology | | |
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? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Lean toward: egalitarianism | | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Accept: Millian | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept: scientific realism | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Lean toward: death | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
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? | Accept: correspondence | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Lean toward: conceivable but not metaphysically possible | I'm not quite sure what 'metaphysically possible' means. I suspect the universe might well be such that anything with the relevant biological make-up has mental properties. Does that make zombies physically impossible? | |