Despite being (IMO) a philosophy blog, many Less Wrongers tend to disparage mainstream philosophy and emphasize the divergence between our beliefs and theirs. But, how different are we really? My intention with this post is to quantify this difference.
The questions I will post as comments to this article are from the 2009 PhilPapers Survey. If you answer "other" on any of the questions, then please reply to that comment in order to elaborate your answer. Later, I'll post another article comparing the answers I obtain from Less Wrongers with those given by the professional philosophers. This should give us some indication about the differences in belief between Less Wrong and mainstream philosophy.
Other:
I dithered on this a lot.
I sympathize with the meta-answer (as above) of discarding the notion of a "justified belief" in favor of talking about how experiences serve as evidence for beliefs, but it's not clear to me that that precludes engaging with the question at its own level. Yes, whether a belief is "justified" can be expressed more precisely in terms of confidence intervals based on available evidence, but I'm not convinced that it needs to be.
I end up saying it depends.
I would say I'm justified in believing the two objects I'm looking at are the same size if they look the same size to me, even if I'm not consciously aware of the process whereby I arrive at that belief, even in cases where it turns out that they aren't the same size after all. Which is an externalist position as described here.
But I would not say I'm justified in believing any proposition I happen to believe. In some cases I would declare a belief unjustified if I'm not aware of the mechanism whereby I arrive at it. So I'm not comfortable describing myself as an externalist in a broader sense, or even as leaning towards externalism in a broader sense.
Thinking about it some more, I suppose this dichotomy dissolves if I'm willing to treat sufficiently vague patterns as a "relevant faculty". "I believe the objects are the same size because that's what my eyes report and my eyes have a good track record about that sort of thing" might qualify as having conscious access to justification, in which case I suppose I'm an internalist... I can't imagine a belief I would call justified for which there isn't some kind of explanation of that sort, however vague, that I can make. But this seems uninteresting.
29novalis
Other: "Justification" is just another complicated pre-Bayes way of trying to understand what belief is.
Despite being (IMO) a philosophy blog, many Less Wrongers tend to disparage mainstream philosophy and emphasize the divergence between our beliefs and theirs. But, how different are we really? My intention with this post is to quantify this difference.
The questions I will post as comments to this article are from the 2009 PhilPapers Survey. If you answer "other" on any of the questions, then please reply to that comment in order to elaborate your answer. Later, I'll post another article comparing the answers I obtain from Less Wrongers with those given by the professional philosophers. This should give us some indication about the differences in belief between Less Wrong and mainstream philosophy.
Glossary
analytic-synthetic distinction, A-theory and B-theory, atheism, compatibilism, consequentialism, contextualism, correspondence theory of truth, deontology, egalitarianism, empiricism, Humeanism, libertarianism, mental content externalism, moral realism, moral motivation internalism and externalism, naturalism, nominalism, Newcomb's problem, physicalism, Platonism, rationalism, relativism, scientific realism, trolley problem, theism, virtue ethics
Note
Thanks pragmatist, for attaching short (mostly accurate) descriptions of the philosophical positions under the poll comments.
Post Script
The polls stopped rendering correctly after the migration to LW 2.0, but the raw data can be found in this repo.