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 | Yup, both synthetic and analytic a priori. | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Lean toward: Platonism | I think that talk of abstract objects needs to be disambiguated in two ways: (what does one mean when we talk about existence of abstract objects? and what does one mean when we talk about their reality?)
I think abstract objects exist, but I do not think they exist in the same way that concrete objects do. They are intentional creations, achieved by a rich combination of cognitive capacities.
I think the question of their reality is a question of how real they are relative to physical things, and, based on the ontological pluralist stance which I laid out above, I am not sure this comparison arises (and neither do the attendant problems). I guess that leads me to some kind of platonism, although a reluctant one. | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept: objective | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: yes | I think tautologies and non-empirical statements exist. | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept another alternative | I think that 'external world talk' presupposes a Cartesian internal/external distinction. I would call myself a certain kind of transcendental idealist, in so far as I think that one cannot give an account of objectivity without simultaneously giving us an account of how objectivity is constituted by intentional practices (Hegelian Logic of the Concept, Kantian Conditions of Possibility or Heideggerian disclosure, or maybe even, on certain readings, Dennettian stances or Searle's original intentionality). | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept: compatibilism | | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | I think the traditional Onto-God doesn't exist. But that doesn't mean God-surrogates in moral normativity don't exist, and neither does that symbolic references to God aren't important. | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Lean toward: rationalism | We certainly have capacities which I don't think can be reduced (in the Humean sense) to sense-contents or Lockean-blank-state affectation, but I don't know if that makes me a rationalist | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Accept: contextualism | yeah, belief attributions do depend on contextual features. My broad phenomenology-inspired holism and transcendental idealism leads me to want to always defer to the horizon of intelligibility in which a phenomenon is disclosed, and this is also true of belief-attribution. | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Accept: non-Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | Yup, content is determined by the environment (at least partly), especially if you accept what is traditionally called non-conceptual content. | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Lean toward: moral realism | Again, truthmaker question is what awaits. | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Accept: non-naturalism | I accept naturalism in so far as it commits us to one world, but not if it commits us to reduction or causal explanation. Also, the claim that the referents of natural scientific theories are intentionally constituted commits me to the claim that the study of our intentional practices is in some way prior to the study of the subject matter of natural science. | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept another alternative | Irreducibility of intentionality, but think that mind and world are not separate. ontological pluralism allows for both (intentional stance, design stance) | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | I think the question is not so much about the truth or falsity of moral statements but what the truthmakers of these statements are (and thus what the ontology of the normative is) | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: externalism | I don't think that there is a necessary connnection between judging that x is moral and being motivated by x. | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Accept: two boxes | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Lean toward: virtue ethics | skeptical about formulation of ethical questions per se (we need a better account of norms, agency and social life to ground ethics), but think virtue ethical accounts fit with intuitions (value pluralism, embeddedness of value exemplification). | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Lean toward: representationalism | I want to try and go for a McDowellian unity of direct realism (non-inferential access to objects, 'thought stopping short of the facts'), use of concepts in perception (ostension and indexicality is important, but so is discrimination and intelligibility). | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Lean toward: psychological view | A phenomenological-transcendental metaphysics means a certain kind of 'mental perspective and self-understanding/self-knowledge' understanding of personal identity. These seem to be psychological in some sense. | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Accept another alternative | Some kind of non-liberal socialism | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Accept: Millian | Names refer to individuals, not descriptions. | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept: scientific realism | Yup, but it depends on what you mean by realism. I do want to say that the theories of natural sciences refer (there is word-world stuff going here, pace Rorty), but I want to say that the intelligible structure of their semantic domain is given by our intentional practices. | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Accept: survival | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Accept another alternative | I accept some version of a phenomenological account of time from which I can get both B-relations and A-predicates. | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Accept: switch | | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Accept: correspondence | propositional truth seems to be in terms of corrrespondence to reality. centuries of philosophy and model theory seem to indicate this. | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Accept: inconceivable | I don't think that qualia is what p-zombie advocates think it is. | |