Suppose I flip a coin 999 times and it comes up heads. I then flip it a hundredth time but don't look at it.
I would be comfortable saying I know without looking that it came up heads. (Sure, there's a chance I'm wrong. There's a chance I'm wrong if I look, too. If "knowledge" denotes the state of absolute certainty, we don't ever know anything. It makes more sense to interpret "knowledge" as denoting greater-than-threshold confidence.)
Would a contemporary empiricist say that I don't know that, because I didn't see it?
That I know this, but it's not novel information?
That it's novel information, but I obtain it through sensory experience? (E.g., observing the previous 999 flips)
Other?
I think the contemporary empiricist would say that all the information you have about the thousandth flip comes from your past sensory experience -- your experience of the previous 999 flips plus other relevant experience (such as, say, experiences that form the basis for your beliefs about the base rate of unfair coins). The extent to which your belief about the thousandth flip justifiably differs from maximum entropy (or zero information) is entirely attributable to your prior experiences.
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.