gjm 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: gjm 11 April 2011 12:34:53PM 1 point [-]

A priori: kinda, but it's not clear that "knowledge" is the right word. Abstracta: nominalism. Aesthetics: subjective. Analytic-synthetic: it's a useful approximation. Epistemic justification: externalism, if I've understood the distinction correctly. External world: non-skeptical realism. Free will: depends on definitions; at any rate, incompatibilist free will doesn't exist and may not even be a coherent notion. God: atheism. Knowledge: empiricism. Knowledge claims: contextualism, I guess. Laws of nature: tentatively non-Humean. Logic: classical. Mental content: internalism about the beliefs/attitudes themselves, but how we describe them, what we do with them, etc., have to engage with the external world. Meta-ethics: anti-realism. Metaphilosophy: naturalism. Mind: physicalism, kinda. (Minds are physical in the same sort of sense as computer programs are.) Moral judgement: mixed (roughly, I think moral judgements originate non-cognitively but then we process them with a lot of the same mental machinery as we use for propositions about matters of fact). Moral motivation: internalism. Newcomb: one box. Normative ethics: consequentialism, with the proviso that various human mental limitations make it advisable (on consequentialist grounds!) not to behave as a pure consequentialist. Perceptual experience: representationalism, I think. Personal identity: psychological, with the proviso that there are imaginable-and-maybe-possible situations in which the notion of "identity" breaks down. Politics: mixed. Proper names: approximately Fregean. Science: realism. Teletransporter: survival, with the same proviso as above. Time: B-theory. Trolley: switch. Truth: correspondence or deflationary; would need to think more to decide whether it matters. Zombies: inconceivable or conceivable but impossible, depending on how you understand "conceivable"; I prefer the former.

Philosophers: Hume, Lewis, Mill, Quine, Russell most. Berkeley, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rousseau least.

Comment author: SilasBarta 11 April 2011 10:42:51PM 1 point [-]

Add two spaces to the end of a line to force a linebreak.

Comment author: gjm 12 April 2011 12:50:54AM 1 point [-]

Not doing so was a deliberate decision. I appreciate that tastes vary.

Comment author: SilasBarta 12 April 2011 02:34:23PM 8 points [-]

You just convinced me to change my answer to aesthetics.

Comment author: gjm 12 April 2011 08:21:46PM 1 point [-]

Wow! (So I checked what it is now. I'm relieved that you didn't change from subjective to objective on the grounds that my formatting was so Obviously Wrong that its wrongness had to be an objective reality :-).)

Comment author: SilasBarta 12 April 2011 09:00:08PM *  3 points [-]

Actually, that was the intended meaning, but since I was half-joking I didn't go through and change my original answer.

Comment author: gjm 12 April 2011 10:27:58PM 1 point [-]

D'oh.