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? | Accept: Platonism | Platonism rocks! | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Lean toward: objective | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Accept: yes | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept: internalism | I accept the "mentalist" version of internalism only. I'm not an "access internalist"! | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: non-skeptical realism | | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept: compatibilism | I don't accept any of the positive theories of free will and responsibility that any compatibilists have developed so far. So I may try to develop my own compatibilist theory myself one of these days... | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept: rationalism | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Accept: contextualism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Lean toward: non-Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Accept: classical | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept an intermediate view | I'm an externalist about what is attributed by "that..." clauses and the like; I deny the existence of "narrow content". However, there are also purely narrow or internal mental properties (not content but "types of content" as I put it) that play an important explanatory role in psychology. | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Accept an intermediate view | Philosophy must take note of and aim to cohere with what has been discovered by the natural sciences. Moreover, this is not a trivial constraint on philosophy. However, philosophy does have a priori methods of its own, which are epistemically and methodologically legitimate. | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Lean toward: physicalism | But only non-reductive physicalism! | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept: internalism | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Accept: two boxes | My intuitions are those of a two-boxer, but I don't accept causal decision theory. So I have tried to develop a different story about why two-boxing is right... | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept: deontology | My intuitions are distinctly deontological. I am opposed to the vague and pretentious moral theories that most deontologists have devised, however, and so my moral theory has much more in common with consequentialists than most deontologists. | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Accept more than one | Although I reject both disjunctivism and sense-datum theory, I accept both representationalism and qualia theory. Perceptual experience is a many-splendoured thing! | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Lean toward: biological view | | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Accept more than one | I'm inclined to accept forms of all three -- at least when they are carefully adapted to allow them to be consistent with each other. | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Accept: Fregean | Like most Oxford philosophers, I venerate the memory of Gareth Evans. | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Lean toward: scientific realism | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Lean toward: death | I strongly lean towards animalism, and I suspect that the right biological theory of animal life will entail that an organism like an animal can't survive a sudden total replacement of all its matter. | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Lean toward: B-theory | | |
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? | Lean toward: correspondence | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Accept: conceivable but not metaphysically possible | Not metaphysically possible, but at least possibly possibly possibly.... possible. (This is one place where the failure of S4 turns out to matter!) | |