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:

QuestionAnswerComments
A priori knowledge: yes or no?Lean toward: yesVery weak form of a priori; we have to take seriously, if only tentatively, immediate seemings of necessity (or at least correctness), else we can't reason at all.
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?Lean toward: Platonism
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?Lean toward: subjectiveIf not subjective, then an objective response-dependent property that can vary from one observer to the next.
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?Lean toward: no
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?Accept: externalism
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?Accept: non-skeptical realism
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?Lean toward: compatibilismCompatibilism, but not as the result of conceptual analysis; rather, as a reconstruction from interesting differences between the causal history of different kinds of actions.
God: theism or atheism?Accept: atheism
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?Accept an intermediate view
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?Lean toward: invariantismIf knowledge is going to be an interesting kind of thing (a natural property worthy of investigation); although contextualism might be right as a description of actual word usage.
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?Accept: non-Humean
Logic: classical or non-classical?Accept: classical
Mental content: internalism or externalism?Lean toward: externalismExternalism plus important facts about realizers -- which one may or may not think count as part of a theory of _content_.
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?Lean toward: moral anti-realismIf there are moral facts, they are very different in nature from what's entailed by our moral judgments
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?Accept: naturalism
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?Accept: physicalism
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?Lean toward: cognitivism
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism?Lean toward: internalismAs a psychological thesis.
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes?Agnostic/undecided
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?Accept another alternativeEither there are no moral facts, or moral facts concern what each of should want given our conception of what it is to live and fare well and a desire that we ourselves and the people we care about live and fare well.
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?Accept: representationalism
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?There is no fact of the matter
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?Reject one, undecided between others
Proper names: Fregean or Millian?Lean toward: MillianI accept a Millian view, but recognizing the contribution of important facts about realizers of mental representations of names (a roughly Fodorian view).
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?Accept: scientific realism
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?Lean toward: survivalInsofar as there is a fact of the matter.
Time: A-theory or B-theory?Accept: B-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?Lean toward: conceivable but not metaphysically possibleSo long as the standards of conceivability are weak. Otherwise, inconceivable.