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 | | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Accept: Platonism | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Lean toward: objective | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Accept: yes | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: internalism | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: idealism | | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept: libertarianism | | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: theism | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | Is a Berkelian neo-platonist and empiricist or a rationalist? | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Lean toward: contextualism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | The question is too unclear to answer | In the empirical world it is Humean, but this is underpinned by the Divine Will. That is, Berkeley is correct which both is and is not Humean. | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Accept: classical | I am assuming that logic concerns valid argument not some ground for the structure of language or a so-called formal semantics. | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept: internalism | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Accept: non-naturalism | | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept: non-physicalism | | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | Cognitivism depends on a 'thick' and probably theistic metaphysics. It cannot be derived by conceptual analysis alone. That gives only the 'universal prescriptivism' of 'The Languague of Morals' but metaphysical facts can determine what it is rational to prescribe (contrary to what Hare thought). | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Skip | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept more than one | | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Accept: sense-datum theory | I'm not sure that I regard the sense datum theory and qualia theory as exclusive. | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept: further-fact view | | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Lean toward: communitarianism | I don't know much about this, but I get the impression that communitarians accept all traditions just because they are the practices of a community. I don't believe that. There are objectively correct traditions (perhaps the plural is a mistake). | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Accept another alternative | Mill is not the opponent of Frege. His view was that names have no 'connotation' but that they rest on background knowledge. The current Mill/Kripke versus Frege idea rests on taking Frefe/Russell logic as a model for language and thought ('it's either a logically proper name or a description') and I think this is wrong. | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | The question is too unclear to answer | There is one true scientific account but in a sense that is compatible with Berkelian idealism. | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Lean toward: death | Maybe the mind woujld go with the simulacrum, under these circumstances | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Accept: A-theory | | |
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? | Accept: correspondence | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Accept: metaphysically possible | With this proviso. Strictly, zombies assume epiphenomenalism. If you ditch that error, some modification of physical law (or extra physical apparatus) is needed to compensate for the loss of the interacting mind. But the basic point is that something could behave jyst like a conscious being without being one. | |