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 | see Putnam. | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Lean toward: nominalism | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept: subjective | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: yes | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: externalism | though there's also a sense in which I want to reject both. | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Lean toward: non-skeptical realism | | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Lean toward: compatibilism | of a very unsatisfying sort that many would deem a 'no free will' view. | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept an intermediate view | but very tempted to say that the question is too unclear to answer. | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Lean toward: invariantism | an invariantism that is nonetheless context-sensitive. | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Lean toward: Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Lean toward: non-classical | 3-valued and relevance logics are cool. | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: externalism | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral anti-realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Lean toward: naturalism | understood in a very broad way. | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept: physicalism | where physicalism = everything in the universe is matter and the interaction of matter. where physicalism does not equal: everything about the mind is discursively learnable or science can explain all facts of the mind | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Lean toward: cognitivism | tempted by: Some claims that purport to be about moral facts are not only truth-apt but true, but they are not true in virtue of their agreement with the moral facts, since there aren't any. They are true only when understood to be about an individual's arational attitudes. Such a view is cognitivist, right? | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Accept: two boxes | I don't understand one-boxers. I mean, I really, literally, don't understand them. Do they believe in backwards causation? | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Lean toward: consequentialism | utility pleases. | |
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? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Reject all | I don't see how this list is exhaustive. | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Lean toward: Millian | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | I am strongly inclined to think that 'survival' must be the right answer, but I suspect there's a decent reason to think 'death' is right, of which I'm unaware. | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Accept: B-theory | I've never heard a convincing case against the following: A-theory is inconsistent with the Special Theory of Relativity and that is very problematic for 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? | Lean toward: correspondence | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Lean toward: conceivable but not metaphysically possible | | |