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 another alternativeA 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: nominalismI 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: subjectiveAlthough 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: externalismI 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 bothNatural 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 viewThe 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 bothWe 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: switchThe 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 matterMetaphysically conceivable, materially possible, but not rationally plausible.