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: no | | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Lean toward: nominalism | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept both | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Accept: no | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept both | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept: compatibilism | | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept: rationalism | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Accept: invariantism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Accept: non-Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Accept: classical | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Lean toward: moral realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Accept: naturalism | | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept: physicalism | | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | "moral motivation" could be equivalent to "constitutively moral motivation" or simply any old motivation to be moral. Mom will love me if I am good" OK its a bad reason to be motivate to be good -- does a motivation need to give one a good reason? if so then internalism is true, if not then "I will obey the categorical imperative for cash" counts | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Accept: two boxes | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept: deontology | | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Accept: representationalism | | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Lean toward: biological view | | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | The question is too unclear to answer | These are all multi-stable and loaded terms in the community I live in. I am a moderate proceduralist-- that makes me a liberal of one stripe (one which is compatible with egalitarianism, I think) | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Accept another alternative | Both views are cosmically simplistic! | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept: scientific realism | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Lean toward: death | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Accept both | | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Accept another alternative | have a nervous breakdown, obviously acting to kill is wrong, but allowing more death is pretty troubling as well | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Accept more than one | correspondence is a platitude which I accept, and is compatible with fairly substantial deflationism | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Accept: conceivable but not metaphysically possible | I think the options are somewhat unclear. I think that the argument which leads to the possibility of zombies is confused. So whether Zombies are inconceivable is the problem -- is a round square inconceivable or merely metaphysically impossible -- we tend towards inconceivable because the example is simply -- it is logically impossible -- but we don't have a clear (and I am tempted to say, distinct) conception of a zombie. | |