My philosophical views

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.

See also:

QuestionAnswerComments
A priori knowledge: yes or no?Accept: yes
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?Lean toward: nominalism
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?Lean toward: subjective
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?Accept: yes
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?Accept: internalism
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?Accept: atheism
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?Accept another alternative
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?Accept: contextualism
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?Lean toward: non-Humean
Logic: classical or non-classical?Lean toward: non-classicalOne needs to do something about the sorites paradox, and it is hard to see how to address it without deviating from classical logic (except by embracing epistemicism, a view I find too incredible to believe).
Mental content: internalism or externalism?Accept: internalismI hold that the most fundamental kind of mental content is internalist (and phenomenally constituted), but that some thought-constituents also have a form of intentionality that constitutively depends in part on internal/external linkages.
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?Accept: moral anti-realism
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?Agnostic/undecided
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?Lean toward: physicalismNo extant treatments of the explanatory gap, aka the hard problem, seem even close to satisfactory to me. But I'm a wannabe physicalist anyway.
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?Accept another alternativeI accept and advocate cognitivist expressivism, a position not on the standard menu of options.
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism?Accept: internalismMy kind of internalism allows for the possibility of the occasional immoralist.
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes?Accept: one box
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?Agnostic/undecided
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?Accept: representationalismMy kind of representationalism is internalist. The envatted brain has sense experience with the same representational content as my sense experience, by virtue of having the same phenomenology.
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?Lean toward: psychological view
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?Accept: death
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?OtherIt seems to me that I'm morally permitted to go either way, and and not obligated one way or the other.
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?Accept: correspondenceI hold that correspondence comes in many flavors, most of which do not require that the right ontology contains entities answering to singular terms and existential quantifiers of true statements.
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?Lean toward: conceivable but not metaphysically possible