Profile for Rick Repetti

My philosophical views

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.

See also:

Question	Answer	Comments
A priori knowledge: yes or no?	Accept: yes	Call me Jerry Katz.
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?	Lean toward: Platonism	Something like Arnold Koslow's structuralism and/or Jerry Katz's intensionalism makes sense to me. I also (don't laugh) had a mystical meditation experience once where I experienced the realm of Plato's Forms...
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?	Accept both	Elements are objective, others subjective.
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?	Accept: yes	Call me Jerry Katz.
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?	Lean toward: externalism	There may be internal-criteria-based forms of knowledge, however exceptional, but generally externalism seems reasonable.
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?	Lean toward: non-skeptical realism	But also agnostic.
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?	Accept: compatibilism	Soft compatibilism, contrary of hard incompatibilism: free will is compatible with both determinism and indeterminism
God: theism or atheism?	The question is too unclear to answer	I'm with Protagoras in that the question is too complex and life is too short, but I think supernatural beings might exist, and thus beings could exist within the abstract category of being into which any kind of God would be subsumed, but even some such beings if they existed would not be gods, much less God. If God means creator, then aliens or simulation designers could be God, and could exist, theoretically. It is also possible that God, traditionally construed, might exist in some form that remotely resembles the way God is traditionally construed, but the argument from evil and others like it render that version of the concept evidentially implausible. Daoist and related mystical oneness alternatives, the ground of being, etc., could exist. If panpsychism is true, and matter and energy are truly eternal, it could have evolved on some globally integrated level to be equivalent to a mind on par with God's omniscience. Etc.
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?	Accept an intermediate view	Both forms of knowledge are plausible, so it follows an intermediate view or blend of both is plausible.
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?	Lean toward: invariantism	Depends on a lot, but properly noted features of context can all be built into justificatory criteria and treated as invariant, analogous to the way Kantian exceptions to universal laws can be specified in universalist terms.
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?	Lean toward: non-Humean	There seem to be some non-Humean laws, but there may also be Humean ones that merely appear genuinely nomological, and even genuine nomologically exceptions generalizations that support and are supported by counterfactuals ranging over their objects/events might be subject to the problem of grue.
Logic: classical or non-classical?	Lean toward: classical	There are many different domains in which inferences of different types may be made, but I suspect that the valid ones can all be expressed in classical logic, suitably enriched.
Mental content: internalism or externalism?	Lean toward: internalism	Because of LSD, which is different from mere tLSD (LSD on Twin Earth), lol.
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?	Lean toward: moral realism	For example, I see the possibility of some sort of metaethical realism, if, say, utility is a meta-principle that all ethical systems implicitly appeal to, but structure differently, depending on different contingencies.
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?	Lean toward: non-naturalism	Parapsychology, panpsychism, quantum entanglement, irreducibility of consciousness, emergentism, etc. all seem plausible, but currently semi-agnostic
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?	Accept both	Both seem possible.
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?	Accept both	Both seem plausible.
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism?	Lean toward: internalism	If I judge 'x is worthy of pursuit', or 'I ought to pursue x', then I am personally inclined to pursue x, under appropriate conditions. Others might not be.
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes?	Lean toward: one box	Tricky. I sense there is an error in the set up of the hypothesis, but cannot articulate the intuition.
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?	Accept more than one	All three are partly on track, but I lean toward a form of particularism that is significantly informed by the insights of all three theories.
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?	Lean toward: disjunctivism	As deceiving as my hallucinations of this survey seem, I think there is a subtle difference: I only experience certain, rich qualia of psychological suffering when completing real surveys.
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?	Lean toward: further-fact view	Too complex to be sure, but biological view seems hasty.
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?	Accept an intermediate view	Libertarianism misses out on collective obligation and fairness towards those who cannot care for themselves, egalitarianism places too much emphasis on those who cannot take care of themselves and ignores the rights of those who are able to generate great value to society, and communitarianism threatens to collapse into group relativism, which enables Naziism, etc., and is on par with individuals in a state of nature (groups in a state of nature relative to each other). Some yet-to-be blend is called for.
Proper names: Fregean or Millian?	Accept: Fregean	Because of Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens.
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?	Lean toward: scientific realism	I think scientific anti-realism correctly acknowledges the ultimately unknowable objects of scientific knowledge in some abstract (perhaps noumenal) sense, but threatens to lose touch with those elements of objective reality that science correctly captures, although that seems to beg the question in favor of realism.
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?	Lean toward: survival	Naive optimism, perhaps... I'm a bit of a Trekkie... But it could be annihilation.
Time: A-theory or B-theory?	Lean toward: B-theory	Don't laugh, but my precognitive experiences of such tremendous complexity as to be extremely improbable as mere coincidences are my primary reason for suspecting that there is some dimension in which all moments are senselessly co-present, somehow.
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch?	Lean toward: switch	Basic trolley: switch. More complex versions: depends.
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?	Lean toward: correspondence	Depends on what are specified as the correspondans, so to speak.
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?	Lean toward: conceivable but not metaphysically possible	Depends: if determinism and monistic physical closure hold, then either we (any of us and our replicas on Twin Earth, say) are all conscious or we are all (deluded about being conscious, but really) zombies (say, if illusionism is true), since any type-identical beings under those two assumptions must have identical mental states.

Applied ethics	Epistemology	History of Western Philosophy	Meta-ethics	Metaphysics	Normative ethics
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