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? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Agnostic/undecided | They strike me as equally plausible. | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: yes | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: non-skeptical realism | I have to pound the table on this one. | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Agnostic/undecided | I used to be a determinist but now I don't know what to think. | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | Atheism all the way baby! | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Agnostic/undecided | I used to consider myself an empiricist but now I have no pony in this race. | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Lean toward: non-Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Agnostic/undecided | I think of myself as a metaethical pluralist here: both realism and anti-realism are equally plausible. I used to be a die hard anti-realist, but now I'm what I call a "working realist": I treat realism, per David Brink's suggestion, as a "working hypothesis." But I'm also, probably unlike David, haunted by the plausibility of anti-realism. | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | I don't know what the issue is here but I generally don't like the term "non-naturalism". I suspect that whatever is being called "non-naturalism" here could be thought of as a legitimate form of naturalism unless it's just supernaturalism. | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | I think that the mind is certainly a function of and dependent on brain processes, and I'm certainly not a substance dualist with respect to the mind. I find mental emergentism, which I take to be a form of property dualism here, to be pretty attractive. | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Agnostic/undecided | All I can say is that I'm a non-consequentialist who thinks that consequences still matter. | |
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? | Lean toward: psychological view | | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Lean toward: egalitarianism | I really like Elizabeth Anderson's relational egalitarian view. | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Lean toward: scientific realism | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Lean toward: switch | | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Lean toward: correspondence | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Lean toward: conceivable but not metaphysically possible | | |