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? | The question is too unclear to answer | Nothing fits the profile that "a priori" knowledge was supposed to have. On the other hand, saying it's all "a posteriori" is also confused. Let's say there's probably lots of a priori knowledge, but having it doesn't imply *knowing* that we have it, or being able to access any of it with certainty. So it won't do the work of grounding arguments or getting everyone to agree about anything. | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Accept another alternative | There are lots of abstract objects, and they don't all deserve the same account! But I'll spring for a cross of Nietzsche's historicist nominalism and Peirce's sifting-toward-the-end-of-inquiry. | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept both | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: no | Is this a matter of potentially relevant contrast and difference, yes. Dichotomy, no. | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: non-skeptical realism | Worlds don't come in external and internal flavors. | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Lean toward: compatibilism | Compatibilists are often complacent that conventional attitudes such as resentment tend to work out well, and they portray our repertoire of attitudes as timeless. Knowledge of human patterns has led people to revise those attitudes, and much more radical revisions are surely in order. | |
God: theism or atheism? | Lean toward: atheism | Charitable interpretation requires that we map as much actually-encountered theistically-framed discourse as we can onto attitudes and expectations that we can make sense of. | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept another alternative | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Lean toward: contextualism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Accept another alternative | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Lean toward: non-classical | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | I embrace "externalism" (among these forced options) only because I vehemently reject "internalism about mental content". But sufficient anti-internalism requires that we not call it "mental content" anyway -- and "the external" is a misleading label for what's *beyond* any notion of the internal. | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Lean toward: naturalism | | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Lean toward: physicalism | non-reductive physicalism. No mysterious non-physical "stuff"... | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Lean toward: cognitivism | But whatever your "non-cognitive" is supposed to cover, my guess is that I embrace it as part of cognition. | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: internalism | I find this debate to be mired in misunderstandings... | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Lean toward: two boxes | I cannot take the hypothesis seriously. | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Lean toward: virtue ethics | I lean pragmatically toward virtue ethics because it is (at its best) the least foundationalist. Moral concerns need not admit of a single reductive measure; concerns about consequences and about principles need not be explained away by virtue ethics. | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Accept another alternative | | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept another alternative | normative view | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Lean toward: communitarianism | I don't think this contrast-class is well-structured. Libertarianism and egalitarianism are social ideals whose intelligibility comes alive only in communities. Communitarianism can embrace the best of the other two. | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Accept another alternative | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | The question is too unclear to answer | The very hypothesis depends on a matter vs form dichotomy -- presumably the old form is replicated with "new matter". But yet we are to imagine some casual process by which the person's structural template is "transported". I'm not sure how that informational transmission could happen without material continuity. Show me a teletransporter and then we can talk about the details... | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Lean toward: switch | This fixation on tidy trolley dilemmas is an embarrassment to philosophy. | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Lean toward: epistemic | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Lean toward: inconceivable | | |