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? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Lean toward: objective | I believe aesthetic judgments are 'subjective' in the sense that they are about our response to aesthetic objects, but they are 'objective' (perhaps 'intersubjective') in that there are justifiable reasons for ascribing aesthetic properties to works of art, which can be shared and debated amongst various people. | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: yes | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | Facts about the world are what ultimately justify our empirical judgments. | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: non-skeptical realism | | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept: compatibilism | | |
God: theism or atheism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept an intermediate view | Although all knowledge begins from experience, not all knowledge is grounded in experience. I believe that there are something like synthetic a priori principles for the possibility of empirical knowledge that are to be disclosed through philosophical investigation, even if we only ultimately discover whether those principles hold true by finding that they make an inferentially-articulated, objectively valid system of empirical judgments possible through our experience of the world. | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Lean toward: contextualism | | |
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 | I accept externalism with respect to the content of perceptual experience and judgments about one's own mind and other minds. | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Lean toward: moral anti-realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Accept: non-naturalism | | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept: non-physicalism | | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Lean toward: cognitivism | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: internalism | | |
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? | Lean toward: further-fact view | If the 'further fact' is an existential commitment toward some conception of what it is for one to be successfully (or doing a good job) living out some self-understanding in terms of a viable human way of life. | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Lean toward: egalitarianism | | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Accept: Fregean | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept: scientific realism | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Accept another alternative | 'Ordinary time' is structured as an 'A-series'; 'pragmatic time' is structured as a 'B-series'; 'originary time' has its own, weird structure. | |
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? | Lean toward: inconceivable | | |