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.
The contention is that "the ordinary meaning" of a word is a fuzzy and ill-defined concept, once holism creeps in.
Consider another example (used by Putnam, I think). Physicists first introduced the concept of "momentum" as the product of mass and velocity. A central fact that made the concept useful was that momentum is conserved in an isolated system. Later, with relativity, it became clear that the conserved quantity is not really the product of mass and velocity, but includes a speed-of-light dependent factor as well. Physicists started then calling this quantity "momentum".
Now, was this a change in the meaning of the word "momentum", or a new fact discovered about the same physical entity momentum? This would seem to depend on whether the first early modern physicist who used the word intended "momentum" to have a fixed meaning as the product of mass and velocity, or as the quantity conserved in an isolated system. But he probably didn't make his intention clear, and in any case his private intention does not matter if meaning is social and holistic. Even if most pre-Einstein physicists would have (if questioned, which they weren't) agreed that "momentum" meant definitionally mass times velocity, post-Einstein physicists may be perfectly justified in saying they would have been wrong, that Einstein made a new physical discovery about the same quantity they were trying to talk about and not merely changed the meaning of words. What is "the ordinary meaning" (pre-Einstein) of "momentum" is not a question with a well-defined answer; the relevant unit of meaning was the whole physical theory, which was replaced by a new one, and we cannot make a clean distinction between which were changes in meaning and which were changes in factual beliefs.
It is more difficult to imagine something like this happening for "bachelor", but according to Quineans, the difference is only of degree.
Considering the present controversy over "the definition of marriage", I think we can imagine many such cases.
Is a man who has lived with the same woman for ten years — but has never had a wedding — a "bachelor"? How about a man who has had a commitment ceremony with another man? (Does it matter if the invitations said "marriage" or "commitment ceremony"?) A man who ha... (read more)