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? | Lean toward: yes | | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept: objective | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: no | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept an intermediate view | Beliefs are justified by things outside the head, but only in virtue of meaningful cognitive contact with them. | |
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? | Accept: theism | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | It's hard to think of a dichotomy less helpful than this one. "Nature or nurture", perhaps. | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Lean toward: contextualism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Accept: non-Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | Only if this means that mental content is determined by things outside the head, and not outside the mind. | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Accept: non-naturalism | However, I reject the identification of the "natural" with the objects postulated by the physical sciences (whichever exactly these are supposed to be). | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept another alternative | I believe human beings are biological organisms whose mental lives can be studied profitably by scientific means. However, I also believe that much of the understanding of human thought and action in the terms of "folk psychology" is at least approximately true, that something like folk psychology is essential to understanding what human beings are, and that any such way of thinking will be too radically different from that of the physical sciences for it to permit a physicalist analysis. | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Reject both | As with epistemology and mental content, I'm inclined to a non-standard view here. | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept: virtue ethics | | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Accept: disjunctivism | | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept more than one | I doubt whether the biological and psychological are separable enough to draw the necessary line between them. | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Reject all | | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Accept: Fregean | Though the sense of a proper name can only very rarely be captured in a definite description. | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Lean toward: scientific realism | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | There is no fact of the matter | | |
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? | Accept: don't switch | | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Lean toward: correspondence | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Lean toward: inconceivable | | |