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: no | | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Accept: nominalism | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept: subjective | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Accept: no | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept another alternative | Internalism leads to circles. Externalism leads to infinity. Neither circles nor infinity can be appropriate means of justification. A new alternative must be discovered, articulated, and defended if epistemology is to have a coherent argument for justification. | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: non-skeptical realism | | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept another alternative | That Laplacian Hard Determinism is true, is false. | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept another alternative | Logical, philosophical, worldly debates cannot let God enter the dialectic. Once God is made mention of, anything is possible. | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept: empiricism | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | There is no fact of the matter | There are some claims of knowledge that are themselves invariant, and others that require context. Some knowledge claims require text, literally, and textual analysis. | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Reject both | Scientific advances and technological works have discovered such impressive results that neither Humean nor Necessitarian views can be seriously considered. If given the absurdly dichotomous choic: Humean or Non-Humean, I will take Non-Humean if it is to imply no further allegiance to another view or school of thought or theory. | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Accept: classical | Classical logic cannot solve all problems.
Classical logic can solve all problems under the conditions that the universe contains no vagueness, and that it lacks no details of resolution.
Within human affairs, classical logic must be the standard. | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral anti-realism | In order to maintain ontological parsimony, we must enter into new fields (such as moral debates and meta-ethics) with the assumption that no such thing exists. The Null Hypothesis has that morals do not exist. The Null Hypothesis can be defeated. such an argument will provide positive and convincing reasons to think that moral realism is true. I am not a meta-ethicist, though I am deeply interested in the subject, so I feel compelled to maintain that no object that is is such that it is a moral. | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Agnostic/undecided | I am too unfamiliar with the subject and texts to make a claim. | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept: physicalism | The philosophy of mind is an amazingly detailed and intricate school of thought. No answer I can give can do justice to the depths of my thoughts and research on the subject. | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | There is no fact of the matter | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Reject both | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept an intermediate view | The acceptable theory of normative ethics cannot rely on one argument to the exclusion of the other. Deontology, virtue ethics, and consequentialism taken alone and to the extreme results in reductio ad absurdum. No one answer by itself can be used as a basis for normative ethics. | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept another alternative | I believe that no answer contemporary author has provided sufficient reasons to pick one view over another. This field of study, personal identity, is ripe for picking and contains vast expanses of logic and literature that have yet been made clear. | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Accept: egalitarianism | | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Reject both | The literature on proper names is confused. No clear argument can be made in favor of either option in this question. | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept: scientific realism | Under the Quinean conception of existence, that "to be is to be the value of a bound variable," I maintain that scientific claims and research involve real existing objects. | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Accept: survival | Survival is possible. | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Accept another alternative | | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | There is no fact of the matter | It depends on which theory of normative ethics is presupposed. | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Lean toward: deflationary | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Accept: inconceivable | I have well articulated defenses for my argument that Zombieism makes no sense; Zombie-talk is incoherent. | |