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 | When discussed in terms of presuppositions that cannot be consistently denied | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept: objective | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: non-skeptical realism | | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
God: theism or atheism? | The question is too unclear to answer | I understand atheism as the view that there is no meaning or purpose to life. Life does have meaning and purpose. I do not accept the view that there is a supreme BEING. | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept: empiricism | But an empiricism not limited to the five senses. | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | The question is too unclear to answer | I deny relativism. | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Lean toward: non-Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Lean toward: classical | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: externalism | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Lean toward: non-naturalism | As long as this does not involve dualism. It is a categorial issue. | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept: non-physicalism | Do not accept scientific naturalism or dualism. | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | But I accept that our emotive powers are cognitive. | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | When one desires X, one takes it that X ought to be/or be done. One can be mistaken about this. | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | The question is too unclear to answer | Categories are too simplistic. | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | The question is too unclear to answer | Deny qualia as nonphysical things, but see semantic intentionality as the real issue. | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Accept: egalitarianism | If this refers to equal opportunities. | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Lean toward: scientific realism | I take it there are empirical facts that scientific investigation can access. I also take it that there are moral truths (context dependent)that scientific investigation cannot access. But there is a value structure to reality that we can access. | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Accept: correspondence | accept that there a value dimension to reality | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | The question is too unclear to answer | What is imaginable is not always thinkable. | |