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 another alternative | A priori, provided you trust the source of that assumption. Essentially, positivism building on itself. Else, pedagogy becomes rather pointless. | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Lean toward: nominalism | I believe that ideas have an existence unto themselves, but that those ideas (forms) may not be able to exist independent of the observer. After all, without the observing philosopher to commentate on all of the things of the world and give them names, does it even matter if an absolute form exists? | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Lean toward: subjective | Although there are, across the spectrum of people, agreed on standards of appreciable aesthetics, it is the unique co-mingling of absolute and subjective qualities which are to be judged aesthetically. | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Skip | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: externalism | I cleave toward the concept of the extended mind. | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Lean toward: compatibilism | | |
God: theism or atheism? | Reject both | Natural theology. There may be a god, but I can't verify it, although it would make sense from my experience of the world. However, I cannot directly know this god, and I doubt it cares about me. Nature's god. | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Lean toward: contextualism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Skip | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Lean toward: non-classical | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Skip | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Skip | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept both | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Skip | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Lean toward: virtue ethics | | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Accept an intermediate view | The experience of sensation requires two to tango--both the experiencee and the experienced. The experienced must have the necessary qualities in order to be sensed, but can exist without being sensed, and the experiencee must have the necessary qualities to be able to sense. Without both the object and the subject, there is no perception. It's a verb. | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Lean toward: psychological view | | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Skip | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Reject both | We are subjective beings--our every experience is subject to a series of conditional arguments about whether or not information is lost during senation, encoding, etc. For this reason, I reject that we can definitively know if science can find the real, or cannot find the real. I am functionally agnostic in regard to the notion that science can discover everything--it may be able, but I am at this time unable to judge if it is or is not absolutely possible. | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Skip | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Skip | | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Accept: switch | The One guides their own moral judgments--it is a difficulty decision, but that does not mean you don't have to make it. Although this at first can appear to be a utilitarian idea, I think of it more as damage control. The quality of the loss of 1-vs-5 requires you know their whole history, so the quick and dirty pragmatic response becomes working with the probability those five will contribute at least as much to society as that one, but highly likely more. | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Lean toward: epistemic | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | There is no fact of the matter | Metaphysically conceivable, materially possible, but not rationally plausible. | |