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? | Lean toward: Platonism | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept both | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: no | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: externalism | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept another alternative | Peircean realism in a somewhat (Galen) Strawsonian world. | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept another alternative | Current options fairly hopeless. | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: theism | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept both | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Accept another alternative | Peircean / Habermasian. | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Accept another alternative | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Accept both | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept both | | |
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? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept both | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept another alternative | A metatheory (not metaethics as it is known) must account for the cogency of not only these three but care and contractarianism as well (which are not subsumable under the three given). | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Lean toward: sense-datum theory | Berkeley remains unanswered, however one chooses to anachronistically classify him among the above. And Peircean perception is closer to Berkeley and worth rethinking. | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept another alternative | | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Lean toward: communitarianism | I notice the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: no Continental and few historical options in these lists. | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Accept another alternative | Peirce again, but there is more to it. | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Reject both | Except insofar as scientific realism is Peircean. | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
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? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Accept: correspondence | I sometimes lean towards sanity, and when I do, I accept correspondence of some kind. | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Lean toward: conceivable but not metaphysically possible | | |