jimrandomh comments on How would you respond to the Philpapers "What are your Philosophical Positions" Survey? - Less Wrong

9 Post author: InquilineKea 11 April 2011 12:40AM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 11 April 2011 04:18:51AM 1 point [-]

A priori knowledge: Yes (in the restricted case of prior probabilities only, and knowledge about a statement has lesser status if it hasn't been updated on enough to minimize sensitivity to changes in prior.)

Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? Reject both as confused

Aesthetic value: Subjective

Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? Insufficiently familiar with the issue (Too confused to determine whether this distinction maps onto a distinction that I actually draw)

Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? The question is too unclear to answer

External world: Realism

Free will: The question is too unclear to answer (it depends on the definition of "free will"; but for most likely definitions Compatibilism works)

God: Atheism

Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? Accept both (but for distinct subsets of the things that can be known)

Knowledge claims: Contextualism

Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? Insufficiently familiar (Find Hume's writing too confusing to determine whether it maps to what I believe or not in broad terms)

Logic: Accept both

Mental content: internalism or externalism? The question is too unclear to answer

Meta-ethics: Anti-realism (IsMoral is a two-place predicate and there is a fact of the matter; uncertain whether I got the mapping to philosophical terminology right)

Metaphilosophy: Naturalism

Mind: Physicalism

Moral judgment: Cognitivism (with the caveat that most ethical sentences express propositions that are underspecified in that they require an agent, agent-pool or utility function to make them unambiguous).

Moral motivation: Reject all (both sides of this debate depend on broken theories of mind)

Newcomb's problem: One box

Normative ethics: Reject all (I favor a combination of all three, with bounded deontological and virtue-ethical terms, but consequentailist terms scaling without bound)

Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? Reject all (these are all just approximations of behaviors of the brain, and are useful as simplified models but occasionally wrong, and not ontologically basic.)

Personal identity: There is no fact of the matter (reduces to a statement about utility functions)

Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? Reject all (these positions all reduce to decision theoretic heurestics and no more)

Proper names: Fregean or Millian? Reject both (confused beyond repair)

Science: Scientific realism

Teletransporter (new matter): Survival, with caveats (subject to empirical test that has non-transferrable evidence)

Time: A-theory or B-theory? There is no fact of the matter (looks like an argument over the definition of the word "real")

Trolley problem: Switch

Truth: Correspondence

Zombies: Inconceivable

And... which of the following philosophers do you identify with? None of the above.