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? | Lean toward: yes | Very 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: subjective | If 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: compatibilism | Compatibilism, 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: invariantism | If 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: externalism | Externalism 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-realism | If 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: internalism | As a psychological thesis. | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept another alternative | Either 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: Millian | I 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: survival | Insofar 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 possible | So long as the standards of conceivability are weak. Otherwise, inconceivable. | |