Taking the Phil Papers Survey
The phil papers survey is a survey sent out to philosophers asking their views on various topics. Sadly, it doesn’t get sent out to philosophy bloggers, so what we philosophy bloggers think, in general, is a deep mystery, akin to which theory of quantum physics is right. But given that I like philosophy and it has a lot of questions, I thought it would be fun to walk through how I’d answer each question.
I’d encourage other people who write about philosophy to do this! It’s always fun to hear what people think about philosophical topics outside of the area they usually discuss. I’d be quite happy to see an article by
or , for instance, about how they’d answer most of the Phil papers questions. I’ll also put probability judgments on these judgments on my beliefs to show how confident I am, given that how one leans is pretty vague.Ultimately, explaining my reasoning behind these was, I think, a good exercise. I skipped a few that I didn’t have anything to say about, and I probably missed a few by accident. But collecting my thoughts on a wide-range of philosophical topics was, I think, a helpful exercise in recalling more philosophical information.
A priori knowledge: no or yes?
A priori knowledge is knowledge that can be gained in the absence of experience. So the question is: does all our knowledge come through experience? Or do we have certain kinds of innate or non-experiential knowledge?
Accept yes with 85% confidence. I think there are certain things that we know not merely through empirical experience. Experience is not enough to justify various true claims about math, morality, modality, or induction, and so given that we know about these things, there must be a priori knowledge.
Abstract objects: nominalism or Platonism?
Platonists think that abstract objects, like the mathematical facts, are real and independent of us. We discover mathematical facts, for instance, and moral facts. Nominalists think they’re in some way constructed by us.
Accept platonism with 75% odds. I think there are, for example, infinite prime numbers. For that to be true, prime numbers have to exist. I also think there are various true moral claims, and yet that commits me to the existence of real moral and mathematical entities. There are, of course, a bunch of different types of nominalism, but I think they all have the core problem that they don’t capture the robustness of facts in their domain.
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?
This one asks whether there’s such thing as objective beauty.
Lean objective with 55% odds. I don’t have super strong views here, but it seems like you can be mistaken about aesthetic facts. So there must be some aesthetic facts. I guess I’d be sort of analogous to a moral naturalist about aesthetic facts—I think they reduce to certain concepts that we have, but that they are real nonetheless. When a person says that Mozart’s music is beautiful, they’re saying something true—and they’re not just saying they happen to like his music.
Aim of philosophy (which is most important?): happiness, truth/knowledge, goodness/justice, wisdom, or understanding?
No view. All seem important. This question seems weirdly ill-formed.
Analytic-synthetic distinction: no or yes?
Lean yes 62% odds. It seems like there’s a perfectly cogent distinction, wherein analytic truths are true because of the meaning of words, while synthetic truths are true because of the way the world is. I haven’t looked that much into why people deny this, but it seems right and the people who deny it all seem to have other mistaken views.
Eating animals and animal products (is it permissible to eat animals and/or animal products in ordinary circumstances?): vegetarianism (no and yes), veganism (no and no), or omnivorism (yes and yes)?
Veganism ended up getting only 18.87% of the vote, which is weird. I think a lot of people misinterpreted the question as being about whether they personally were vegetarian. It’s particularly surprising given that almost all the published papers on the topic conclude that eating meat in ordinary circumstances is immoral, with the only objectors to this view either pushing some version of the causal impotence objection or being Timothy Hsiao who avoids the arguments for ethical veganism by not being sensitive to moral reasons.
But anyway, I accept veganism, obviously. I think you shouldn’t cause others to undergo extreme suffering for minor benefit.
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?
Lean internalism. Internalism says that whether you’re justified depends only on the content of your mental state, externalism denies that. So an externalist, might think, for instance, that whether your beliefs were formed by a process that generally reaches true beliefs affects justification, even if it doens’t affect the content of your mental state. I find it weird that whether you’re justified could depend on external factors that don’t affect your mental state. This isn’t a topic I’ve thought that much about though, so that’s why it’s only a leaning.
Experience machine (would you enter?): no or yes?
The experience machine was first introduced by Nozick as a counterexample to hedonism about well-being:
Imagine a machine that could give you any experience (or sequence of experiences) you might desire. When connected to this experience machine, you can have the experience of writing a great poem or bringing about world peace or loving someone and being loved in return. You can experience the felt pleasures of these things, how they feel “from the inside.” You can program your experiences for tomorrow, or this week, or this year, or even for the rest of your life. If your imagination is impoverished, you can use the library of suggestions extracted from biographies and enhanced by novelists and psychologists. You can live your fondest dreams “from the inside.” Would you choose to do this for the rest of your life? If not, why not? (Other people also have the same option of using these machines which, let us suppose, are provided by friendly and trustworthy beings from another galaxy, so you need not refuse connecting in order to help others.) The question is not whether to try the machine temporarily, but whether to enter it for the rest of your life. Upon entering, you will not remember having done this; so no pleasures will get ruined by realizing they are machine-produced. Uncertainty too might be programmed by using the machine’s optional random device (upon which various preselected alternatives can depend).
Lean yes 55% odds. I still weakly lean towards hedonism about well-being, and so I think plugging into the experience machine is probably right.
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?
Non-skeptical realism says that the external world exists, idealism says only consciousness exists, skepticism denies the existence of the external world and says something like that you’re a brain in a vat. Accept realism 92% odds. Skepticism is super implausible and idealism doesn’t seem that likely—it’s hard to give a coherent idealist picture of our enduring experiences over time that’s simpler than theories according to which there’s an external world.
Footbridge (pushing man off bridge will save five on track below, what ought one do?): push or don't push?
In the Footbridge case, you can push one person off a bridge to stop a train from running over five people. Should you? I Accept push 85% odds. This is because utilitarianism is obviously the right view, and not pushing the person requires violating the ex ante pareto principle in extremely counterintuitive ways.
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?
Lean towards compatibilism 55% compatibilism, 30% libertarianism, 10% no free will, 5% other (the answer is vague or malformed). I basically think compatibilism is the default because it seems like we have free will and it also seems like determinism is true based on the scientific data. But I’m still at 30% credence in libertarianism because I think theism is decently plausible and theism pretty much requires libertarianism to get around the problem of evil—if we can be free while being determined, why not make us always determined to do what’s right.
Gender: psychological, social, biological, or unreal?
Lean social. 55% social, 10% psychological, 20% biological, 5% unreal, 10% other (it’s vague or something). I’ve addressed this elsewhere.
God: atheism or theism?
Lean towards atheism with 60% probability. I’ve talked about this a lot elsewhere—I think there’s a lot of evidence on both sides, but it’s just so hard to overcome the problem of evil. Though the nomological fine-tuning argument, argument from psychophysical harmony, and anthropic argument give me pause.
Knowledge: rationalism or empiricism?
Lean rationalism 60% probability. Rationalists think that we can get a lot of knowledge through thought alone, through reasoning absent experience, while empiricsts think almost all of our knowledge comes through experience. I haven’t thought about this topic that much, but it seems we get a lot of knowledge—see the stuff I talked about in response to the first question—not through sense data.
Knowledge claims: invariantism, relativism, or contextualism?
This asks whether to say one knows things varies from context to context. I accept contextualism 70% probability. For instance, it seems perfectly kosher to say “only 50% of Americans know the three branches of government.” If one says this, they are using knowledge differently from how one uses knowledge when they’re asking about justification. Sometimes knowledge just means true belief, othertimes it is used more expansively (E.g. in Gettier cases).
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?
Accept non-humean 70% probability. Humeans think that laws are just summaries of the behavior of matter while non-humeans think that laws are, in some way, what makes matter behaves a certain way. I just think this humeanism is obviously false intuitively—there has to be something that makes matter behave a certain way. Furthermore, it implies bizarre things, like that if two laws predict the same things in actual situations, but different things if someone builds a particular accelerator, but no one builds a particle accelerator, then there’s no fact of the matter about which law obtains in our universe, because both of them give the same description of behavior. That’s nuts!
Logic: non-classical or classical?
Lean classical 55% probability. Doesn’t seem like there’s a good reason to change any of the rules of classical logic, but this isn’t a topic that I’ve thought about much. I haven’t even taken a logic class yet.
Meaning of life: objective, nonexistent, or subjective?
Question is too unclear to answer.
Mental content: externalism or internalism?
No view. I think this is asking whether what our thoughts are about depends in some way on the external world. I don’t really get this one.
Meta-ethics: moral anti-realism or moral realism?
Accept moral realism 90% odds. I’ve argued for this before—in short, I think it’s wrong to torture people even everyone has a pro attitude towards torture.
Metaphilosophy: non-naturalism or naturalism?
This one asks whether non-naturalism is right—whether there are lots of true things that aren’t facts about the natural world. Accept non-naturalism 78% odds. I think that moral naturalism is implausible for a bunch of reasons—and so non-naturalism must be broadly right. I feel the same way about most domains that might be non-natural. When we say that married bachelors are impossible, that’s not a claim about the natural world, though it is true. In fact, that implies that same things about the actual world as the statement “there are no married bachelors,” yet they have different meanings and truth conditions.
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?
Physicalists about the mind think that the mind is just a physical thing, like rocks and trees and soup. Accept non-physicalism 73% odds. I’ve argued for this before—I think that all the things that Chalmers says in The Conscious Mind are right and that roughly settles the issue. One could have consciousness without matter or a world physically identical to ours without having any consciousness, which proves consciousness isn’t constitued by physical facts.
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?
Accept cognitivism 93% odds. Cognitivists claim that moral judgments express propositions—when a person says “murder is wrong,” they’re saying something about the world, something that could be true or false. Non-cognitivists say that these statements don’t express propositions—saying murder is wrong is like saying “boo murder” or “don’t murder!” None of these things can be true or false. Non-cognitivism has a bunch of problems. First of all, moral sentences just seem obviously to be expressing propositions. When a person says “abortion is wrong,” they’re not just expressing their attitude, they’re saying something about the world.
Second, moral statements function like propositions. You can ask questions about propositions: if you say Jim is tall, you can ask “if Jim tall?” You can’t do this for non-cognitive utterances—you can’t ask “is shut the door?” Similarly, you can have propositions be premises, and make conditional claims about them, such as “if murder is wrong, then Ted Bundy acted wrongly,” or “if Jim’s family is all tall, then Jim must be tall.” You can’t do this with non-cognitive utterances like “if shut the door, then shut the door now.” That makes no sense. Huemer has a list of other tests like this—on all of them, it looks propositional.
Moral motivation: externalism or internalism?
Accept externalism 71% odds. I’ve just never understood the motivation for internalism. Why think that realizing that some action is right entails being motivated to do it, as internalists claim? You can just not care about the moral facts. Now, I think it’s irrational not to care, but it seems perfectly coherent to imagine people doing it.
Newcomb's problem: two boxes or one box?
Newcomb’s problem is summarized here:
There are two boxes before you, Box A and Box B. You have a choice as to whether you can take only the contents of Box B, or can take the contents of Box A and Box B. The Predictor has placed $1000 in Box A. If the Predictor predicts that you will take only Box B, he has placed $1,000,000 in Box B. If the Predictor predicts that you will take the contents of both boxes, he has placed nothing in Box B. You’ve observed that, in the past, the Predictor is right every time. If your aim is to maximize your money, should you choose to take the contents of Box B alone, or the contents of both boxes?
Lean towards two boxes 55% odds. I’m really undecided here—I think in the smoker’s lesion case, you should obviously smoke, in the prisoner’s dilemma with twin case, you should obviously cooperate, and I’m not really sure which one Newcomb’s problem is more like.
Normative ethics: consequentialism, deontology, or virtue ethics?
Accept consequentialism 85% odds. Consequentialism says that you should always take the action with the best consequences, deontology says there are constraints on your pursuit of the best consequences, and virtue ethics says morality is really about being virtuous, and so thinking about it in terms of how to act is confused. The only reason I’m not at >99% odds is that lots of smart people disagree with me. This one seems about as settled as philosophical issues get, with a notable exception that we’ll see later.
Perceptual experience: qualia theory, disjunctivism, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?
No clue what this means.
Personal identity: biological view, further-fact view, or psychological view?
What makes you the same person over time? The biological view says your biology, the further-fact view says some further fact beyond biology and psychology, and the psychological view says it’s having a sufficiently similar psychology over time. Accept further fact view 65% odds. I know most philosophers disagree with me about this, but I think the case for souls is pretty overwhelming. The reductionist views are just so implausible and have ridiculous results in cases with disembodied minds.
Philosophical progress (is there any?): a little, none, or a lot?
Lean towards a lot 54% odds. There just seem like a lot of topics that we’ve learned a lot about. E.g. we now know that slavery is wrong and have much more advanced versions of moral non-naturalism. As Huemer says in Knowledge, Reality, and Value:
Myth #2: Philosophy never makes progress. Philosophers are still debating the same things they were debating 2000 years ago.
Comment: No, that’s completely false.
a. On “debating the same questions”: Here are some things that philosophers were not debating 2000 years ago: Criteria of ontological commitment. Modal realism. Reliabilism. Semantic externalism. Paraconsistent logic. Functionalism. Expressivist metaethics.
You probably don’t know what any of those things are. But those are all well-known and important topics of contemporary debate which any philosophy professor will recognize, and none of them was discussed by Plato, or Aristotle, or any other ancient philosopher. Though Western philosophy has been around for 2000 years, none of those issues, to the best of my knowledge, was ever discussed by anyone more than 100 years ago. And having seen that list, any professional philosopher could now extend it with many more examples.
b. On progress: Here are some questions on which we’ve made progress:
i.Is slavery just? No joke! Aristotle, often considered history’s greatest philosopher, thought slavery was just. No one thinks that anymore
ii.Which is better: dictatorship or democracy? Seriously, Plato (also considered one of history’s greatest philosophers) thought the answer was “dictatorship” (as long as the dictator is a philosopher!). No one thinks that anymore.
iii.Is homosexuality wrong? Historically, philosophers and nonphilosophers alike have held different views on this question, with many thinking homosexuality was morally wrong, including such great philosophers as Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant. Today, almost everyone agrees that homosexuality is obviously fine.
iv.Is nature teleological? Historically, many philosophers, following Aristotle, thought that inanimate objects and insentient life forms had natural goals built into them. Conscious beings had such goals too, and they didn’t necessarily correspond to what those beings wanted. Today, hardly anyone thinks that. (The small number whodo are almost all Catholic philosophers, because that was what Catholicism’s greatest philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, thought.)
v.What is knowledge? The orthodoxy in epistemology used to be that “knowledge” could be defined as “justified, true belief”. Today, basically everyone agrees that that’s wrong.
Political philosophy: communitarianism, libertarianism, or egalitarianism?
Seems ill-formed. No view.
Proper names: Fregean or Millian?
This one is well summarized by Quora:
On the Millian account, the meaning of a proper name is the object to which it refers.
What commonly is associated with Frege (and Russell, amongst others), the descriptive theory of names, instead holds that the meaning of a proper name is a definite description associated with it by a speaker. (Its reference is the object that satisfy the description.)
The proper name Barack Obama, for example, on a Millian account means its bearer, simply. To a descriptivist it may mean something like "the President of the United States", in a hypothetical idiolect.
No view. I remember thinking about this for about ten minutes when reading naming and necessity and leaning towards Millianism but I have no settled view.
Race: unreal, biological, or social?
No view—I haven’t really thought about this.
Science: scientific anti-realism or scientific realism?
Lean scientific realism 64%. I always have trouble following this debate, but the scientific anti-realists seem to be saying crazy things, so I lean towards scientific realism. The anti-realists deny that the things that are described by our best science are real and that we’re gaining knowledge of them. The realists say they are real and we gain knowledge of them. Scientific realism just seems obviously right, but then I feel like I’m missing something, so it’s hard to know.
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?
Imagine your body is destroyed but then copied and recreated on the other side of the universe. Do you survive?
Lean towards death 55% odds. I think you’re a soul, and on the soul view, it seems most natural to suppose that you get a new soul.
Time: A-theory or B-theory?
A-theorists think that only the present is real. They think that the past used to be real and the future will be real, while the present is real now. B-theorists think that the past, present, and future are all equally real, a bit like different points in space. On the B-theory, there’s no objective present—each time is equally real.
Lean towards B-theory 65% odds. Ted Sider makes a good case for it in his book Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time. It’s supported by evidence from physics, provides the best account of various mereological puzzles, resolves various odd semantic puzzles, and is needed to rescue any version of the view on which truths have truth makers (if the past doesn’t exist, how can it make true present claims?) Thus, those rejecting B-theory must reject plausible claims like that truth supervenes on being—that what is true is solely a function of what is. Richard also has a good article on this—time passing seems weirdly incoherent when you really think about it.
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch?
Accept switch 95% probability. It’s like the footbridge case, but even most people who think you should not push the guy off the footbridge think you should flip the switch. So it’s even more obvious than that already super obvious case.
Truth: deflationary, correspondence, or epistemic?
Accept correspondence: 85% probability. Correspondence theorists say that truth is what corresponds to reality, deflationary accounts say that saying “it’s true that P” is basically just saying P—truth doesn’t add anything. Epistemic theories say that truth is something like what one would take to be the case if exposed to the full range of evidence. The others just seem ridiculous. I can’t think of any counterexamples to the generalization some proposition is true only if it corresponds to reality.
Vagueness: metaphysical, semantic, or epistemic?
Is reality vague? Or is vagueness just a byproduct of language? Or is it a byproduct of our imprecise thoughts? 40% semantic 30% epistemic 30% metaphysical. I think finite cases admit of no vagueness, but value might be vague in certain infinite cases. In non-infinite cases, however, I basically share Richard’s intuition:
But it seems overwhelmingly plausible to me, as a pre-theoretic datum, that whatever is of fundamental moral significance cannot admit of vagueness. After all, (i) there is plausibly no "ontic vagueness": the world itself is precise/determinate in all fundamental respects; vagueness merely enters (as a semantic matter) into our high-level descriptions -- whether we call a thus-sized collection of grains a "heap", or whether we call a person with a certain number of hairs on their head "bald", etc. It's not as though there's some objective property of baldness out there in the world that we're trying to latch on to. (ii) The things that matter are features of the world, not of our vague descriptions. So (iii) the things that matter don't admit of vagueness.
Zombies: conceivable but not metaphysically possible, metaphysically possible, or inconceivable?
A zombie is a being that’s physically exactly like a human but that lacks consciousness. So it would be the same down to the last atom, but it wouldn’t be conscious. Is this thing a) possible but just not real b) in some way contradictory or incoherent or c) impossible but not contradictory or incoherent.
Accept metaphysically possible 73% odds, inconceivable 15% odds, conceivable but not metaphysically possible 12% odds. This is for the same reason that I think physicalism is false. It just seems overwhelmingly plausible that zombies are possible. This is one of the things that I feel I get in a hard to articulate way—I can see where people who think zombies are impossible are going wrong, yet it’s very hard to describe.
Abortion (first trimester, no special circumstances): permissible or impermissible?
Lean towards permissible 60% odds. I think that it’s not a person yet if it doesn’t have a soul, so abortion kills no one. Prior to consciousness, the fetus has no soul.
Aesthetic experience: pleasure, sui generis, or perception?
Huh?
Analysis of knowledge: other analysis, justified true belief, or no analysis?
Question is unclear. I reject that knowledge is just justified true belief, but I think it’s probably some modified version of justified true belief—maybe warranted justified true belief or something. No analysis is also decently plausible, though I think other analysis is really implausible.
Arguments for theism (which argument is strongest?): design, pragmatic, moral, ontological, or cosmological?
Obviously design. Variants of the fine-tuning argument are ridiculously convincing.
Capital punishment: impermissible or permissible?
Undecided.
Causation: nonexistent, counterfactual/difference-making, primitive, or process/production?
Lean towards counterfactual/difference-making 50% odds, but I haven’t thought about it too much. It seems like to say A causes B is to say that in the causal process B follows A and B is such that if A happens B happens but if A hadn’t happened B wouldn’t have happened relative to some context-dependent version of the world where A hadn’t happened. It being context-dependent is important to avoid counterexamples.
I remember before I got into philosophy, I had this view very strongly. It just seemed obvious. My core view hasn’t changed much but I’ve gotten less confident because smart people disagree with me.
Chinese room: understands or doesn't understand?
This one is well-summarized by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.
Searle goes on to say, “The point of the argument is this: if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have.”
Accept doesn’t understand 80% odds. This one just seems obvious. I don’t have a further argument for it, but it just seems absurd that they understand if they don’t know Chinese.
Concepts: nativism or empiricism?
No view.
Consciousness: identity theory, dualism, eliminativism, functionalism, or panpsychism?
Accept dualism 55% probability. Dualists think that consciousness is real and distinct from the physical. I think dualism ends up being simpler than other theories, because if you take consciousness to be fundamental, it has to have new laws governing its combination.
Continuum hypothesis (does it have a determinate truth-value?): determinate or indeterminate?
The smallest infinite if Aleph null—it’s equal to the number of natural numbers: 1,2,3, etc. The second smallest infinite is, by definition, aleph 1. Aleph n is the nth smallest infinite.
Beth 0=aleph null. Beth 1=the number of real numbers which include infinite non-repeating decimals. So hypothesis is that aleph 1=beth 1—that the number of real numbers is the second smallest infinite.
No view. I’m also confused—why would it not have a determinate truth value? My understanding was that there was debate over whether it was true, but I don’t get why whether its truth value is determinant is in dispute.
I might look into this one a bit because it seems interesting, though it’s probably outside of my grasp given my limited mathematical knowledge.
Unrelated: I saw someone on YouTube when asked about the continuum hypothesis Google it before proceeding to say “it just seems true,” and accept it.
Environmental ethics: non-anthropocentric or anthropocentric?
I don’t really get what it’s asking. I think we should take into account the interests of non-human animals in our environmental policies. Isn’t that obvious? Though I probably think this point in favor of more deforestation and environmental destruction.
Extended mind: no or yes?
This one is nicely summarized:
The extended mind theory says that 'cognition' does not just happen in our heads. Just as a prosthetic limb can become part of a body, technology such as computers (or even notebooks) become part of our minds
Weak leaning towards yes ~53% odds. I found the Chalmers thought experiment compelling but beyond that haven’t thought about it much.
Foundations of mathematics: logicism, constructivism/intuitionism, formalism, structuralism, or set-theoretic?
No view, except the intuitionists seem to say weird things.
Gender categories: revise, eliminate, or preserve?
No view.
Grounds of intentionality: primitive, phenomenal, interpretational, causal/teleological, or inferential?
Intentionality is aboutness. So what grounds our thoughts being about stuff: some part of the experience, some interpretation (I don’t really get this answer), some causal story or way it’s oriented towards something, or so inferential (I don’t understand what this is saying).
Lean towards primitive, but I don’t really know much about this topic. I probably shouldn’t have a view about it because I don’t know what most of the possible views mean.
Hard problem of consciousness (is there one?): no or yes?
Yep. You can’t get consciousness from matter moving around. Even after you explain the behavior of everything in the universe, there’s still more to be explained.
Human genetic engineering: permissible or impermissible?
Permissible, obviously 93% probability.
Hume (what is his view?): naturalist or skeptic?
No view.
Immortality (would you choose it?): yes or no?
Yep, death is bad. We only think it’s good because of status quo bias and a tendency to commit the just world fallacy (this is my most LessWrongy belief).
Interlevel metaphysics (which is the most useful?): supervenience, realization, grounding, or identity?
I love all interlevel metaphysics equally.
Justification: infinitism, coherentism, reliabilism, or nonreliabilist foundationalism?
Suppose you keep asking why you believe things you believe. Foundationalists think you’ll just bottom out in certain things that have no deeper justification, coherentists think they’ll form a coherent web, each relying on each other and strengthening each other, reliabilists are a kind of foundationalist who thinks it will eventually bottom out in beliefs that are justified only if they’re generally reliable, and infinitists think that the chain will keep going forever, where each belief is based on another belief.
Accept foundationalism 75% probability. I think Huemer’s arguments pretty much settle it.
Kant (what is his view?): one world or two worlds?
No view. Ancient philosophers are boooooooring and it’s hard to know what they’re saying. I also don’t care at all.
Law: legal positivism or legal non-positivism?
No view.
Material composition: nihilism, universalism, or restrictivism?
Some composite objects like tables and chairs exist. These things aren’t fundamental but they’re made of other stuff. Nihilists say things like tables and chairs don’t exist, universalists say every combination of fundamental stuff is its own composite object (e.g. there’s a composite object composed of me, your mom, and Joe Biden), and restrictivists say that only some combinations of stuff form composite objects (so chairs exist but the composite objects composed of a random chair, a random turkey, three Brazilian men, an atom from alpha centauri, and Obama doesn’t exist).
Lean towards universalism (40% universalism, 33% nihilism, 10% restrictivism, 17% other). I think it’s somewhat likely we’re talking past each other, but if saying something exists just means it’s part of reality, well, for any possible combination of things, it’s a part of reality. I reject nihilism because it seems like there are tables.
Metaontology: anti-realism, deflationary realism, or heavyweight realism?
Don’t really understand the question.
Method in history of philosophy (which do you prefer?): contextual/historicist or analytic/rational reconstruction?
No view.
Method in political philosophy (which do you prefer?): non-ideal theory or ideal theory?
No view.
Mind uploading (brain replaced by digital emulation): death or survival?
Suppose your brain was uploaded on a computer: would you survive? Lean towards death 59% odds. I think you’re probably a soul, and souls might be unable to be attached to silicone.
Moral principles: moral particularism or moral generalism?
Accept moral generalism 90% odds. Moral generalists say there are certain universal rules that tell you what you should do in all circumstances, while moral particularists deny that.
Moral particularism has the problem that it’s infinitely complex—to fully describe moral reality you’d need an infinite number of laws. Furthermore, because it has so many manipulable parameters, it’s basically impossible to get evidence for it.
Morality: constructivism, error theory, non-naturalism, naturalist realism, or expressivism?
Accept non-naturalism 73% odds, for reasons I’ve already explained.
Normative concepts (which is most fundamental?): value, ought, fit, or reasons?
There are lots of different normative concepts. We often call things wrong, say you have a reason not to do them, say that some action isn’t fitting, etc. But is there one that’s more fundamental, that all the other ones reduce to?
Lean towards reasons. All of the other stuff can be expressed in terms of reasons (though see Richard’s paper arguing that fittingness is the right answer).
Other minds (for which groups are some members conscious?)
It lists a bunch of groups.
Adult humans: 99.9999%.
Cats: 95%.
Fish 63%.
Flies 40% (Dustin Crummett has looked into insect consciousness more than I have and he thinks they’re probably mostly conscious, though flies are one of the less good candidates for conscious insects).
Worms 29%.
Plants .2%.
Particles 4%.
Newborn babies 97%.
Current AI systems: 2.2%.
Future AI systems 35%.
Ought implies can: no or yes?
To say that you ought to take some action, do you have to be able to take that action?
Accept yes 77% confidence. I basically think all of the counterexamples fall apart when you think about them for five seconds and that ought implying can is really obvious. It also best explains our intuitions about a wide variety of cases.
Philosophical knowledge (is there any?): none, a lot, or a little?
A lot 60% confident. We know lots of cool things like that we have arms, consciousness exists…and that’s about all that philosophers agree on. Still, I think many more philosophers have the true view about morality, consciousness, meat-eating, anthropics, and a bunch of other topics than general members of the public. Richard has a good list of things that we know from philosophy:
1. Knowledge does not require certainty. But nor does justified true belief suffice.
2. Psychological egoism is false: it is possible to act from non-selfish desires, i.e. for some good other than your own welfare.
3. Rational egoism is false: we are not rationally required to always and only act in our own self-interest.
4. (E.g. Moral) Principles may take situational variables into account without thereby sacrificing their claim to objectivity.
5. The question whether God actually exists is independent of the question whether there is genuine normativity ("ought"-ness).
6. Valuing tolerance needn't lead one to moral relativism. (Quite the opposite.)
7. Red herrings may (and black ravens may not) constitute evidence that all ravens are black.
8. It's not analytic (true by definition) that cats are animals. But it is metaphysically necessary: there is no possible world containing a cat that is not an animal.
Slightly more controversial (but still extremely well-supported, IMO):
9. "Common-sense" morality, with its agent-relative ends, is self-defeating.
10. Capitalism is not intrinsically just. (Libertarianism must be defended on consequentialist grounds, if any. Those who think otherwise are confused about the nature of property and coercion.)
11. It is possible for desires (or ultimate ends) to be irrational. So there is more to rationality than just instrumental rationality.
12. One may be harmed by events that took place prior to their coming into existence.
2 is an especially good example. It seems believed by most non-philosophers, yet it’s just ridiculously implausible and is a byproduct of poor thinking.
Plato (what is his view?): knowledge only of forms or knowledge also of concrete things?
No view.
Politics: socialism or capitalism?
Lean towards capitalism, but it depends exactly what people mean by this. I think it’s decently likely that a system roughly like exists in the Nordic countries would work pretty well. Whether this counts as socialism is just a semantic question.
Possible worlds: nonexistent, abstract, or concrete?
A possible world is a possible way that reality could be. So, for instance, even though I didn’t eat breakfast this morning, there’s a possible world where I did eat breakfast this morning. So this question is asking if those worlds really exist. People who answer concrete think that the worlds exist in just the same way as this world—that other possible worlds are physically real, made of stuff. This was a view David Lewis had—he thinks there actually is a version of me that didn’t eat breakfast this morning.
I accept that possible worlds are abstract 65% probability. It seems like for something to be true there must be something that makes it true. But there are truths about possibility—it’s true that there can’t be married bachelors. I don’t think you can make sense of truths about possibility without truths about possible worlds, which just describe complete descriptions of ways things can be. But I think the Lewis view that those worlds concretely exist is crazy—and it undermines induction.
Practical reason: Humean, Aristotelian, or Kantian?
I don’t know what this means.
Properties: immanent universals, transcendent universals, tropes, nonexistent, or classes?
No clue.
Propositional attitudes: dispositional, phenomenal, representational, or nonexistent?
A propositional attitude is a judgment you have in your mind about a way the world is. For example, I have the judgment that I possess hands. What does having this judgment consist in? Dispositionalists say that it consists in having a disposition to act in certain ways—to say that I possess hands, to act as if I possess hands, to bet that I possess hands. Representationalists say that it consists in me having a mental representation of the world being that way—the information stored in my brain represents the world as being that way. Phenomenal people say that there’s some state of consciousness associated with the belief—there’s some experience that is equivalent to having the belief.
I don’t really have much of a view here. I remember Eric Schwitzgebel had some convincing arguments a while ago against views other than dispositionalism, but it also seems possible to be convinced of some proposition but not to act like you were. One could imagine a very strange agent who beliefs that God exists, for instance, but is disposed to act, in all ways, like God doesn’t exist. Maybe I lean slightly towards representational accounts, but even those have problems—consider a number that one can’t write down. I believe that it exists, but I don’t think that my brain stores information about its existence.
Oh, and I reject the view they’re nonexistent, because it seems like I believe the sky is blue, for instance.
Propositions: structured entities, simple entities, nonexistent, acts, or sets?
No clue what this means.
Quantum mechanics: epistemic, hidden-variables, many-worlds, or collapse?
No view, though if this world was all that existed, I’d accept many-worlds, because it predicts the existence of more people than other theories, which gives one anthropic reason to think is more likely.
Race categories: revise, eliminate, or preserve?
No view.
Rational disagreement (can two people with the same evidence rationally disagree?): permissivism or non-permissivism?
Imagine that two people are both fully rational and they have the same evidence. Can they ever disagree? I’m pretty agnostic, I’d say exactly 50/50.
Response to external-world skepticism (which is strongest?): semantic externalist, dogmatist, pragmatic, contextualist, epistemic externalist, or abductive?
External-world skepticism is the position that the external world doesn’t exist. How should we respond to this? The abductive answer says by pointing out that it’s a bad explanation of various features of the world, the semantic externalists say weird things that are hard to explain, as do the epistemic externalists and contextualists, the dogmatists just say that one should have a brute presumption in favor of an external world, and the pragmatic people say that regardless of whether it’s true, you should live as if it’s false.
I accept abductive and dogmatic. I think that this skepticism is very crazy, so you should reject it unless you have a good reason to accept it, because you should have a default trust in your seeming. Also, I think it’s a very poor explanation of lots of our experience, for the reasons. It’s also not at all simple when one tries to fill in the details, and posits all sorts of arbitrary, unexplainable limits.
I don’t think pragmatic is a good response. You should believe what’s true. If it turns out I’m a brain in a vat, that would be good to know—I’d stop donating so much to effective charities, for instance, and just spend on things that benefit me (at least, if I was sufficiently confident that other people weren’t real).
Principle of sufficient reason: true or false?
Lean towards false 60% probability. The principle of sufficient reason claims that everything that happens has a sufficient explanation for why it happens. I think it’s probably false though, for there’s no plausible story of the first thing having a reason for its existence. It seems like whatever the first thing was, it could have been otherwise, so it coudn’t have had a sufficient reason for its existence.
Semantic content (which expressions are context-dependent?): radical contextualism (most or all) , minimalism (no more than a few), or moderate contextualism (intermediate)?
No view.
Sleeping beauty (woken once if heads, woken twice if tails, credence in heads on waking?): one-half or one-third?
The sleeping beauty problem was introduced and summarized by Elga:
The Sleeping Beauty problem: Some researchers are going to put you to sleep. During the two days that your sleep will last, they will briefly wake you up either once or twice, depending on the toss of a fair coin (Heads: once; Tails: twice). After each waking, they will put you to back to sleep with a drug that makes you forget that waking.2 When you are first awakened, to what degree ought you believe that the outcome of the coin toss is Heads?
Accept one-third 92% probability. This is one of the philosophical views I’m most confident in. I’ve written about this in various places, here, here, here, and here, for example. I feel like this one is as close to proved as controversial philosophical results get.
Spacetime: relationism or substantivalism?
No clue on what the right answer is or what it means.
Statue and lump: two things or one thing?
Suppose there’s a lump of clay. It then it molded into a statue. Are there two things—a statue and a lump—or just one thing total.
Lean towards no fact of the matter. I accept the existence of temporal parts, and find mereological nihilism plausible, so the two views I lean towards are:
neither exists.
there’s one composite object composed of both of them, one composed of just one, one composed of just the other. Which thing you’re talking about will determine the answer.
Sider in his book on 4-dimensionalism talks more about the second option.
Temporal ontology: presentism, eternalism, or growing block?
This is a bit like the A-theory vs B-theory question. Presentists think only the present really exists—the future will exist and the past has existed, but only the present does exist. Growing block theorists think the present and past exist, and eternalists think the past, present, and future exist equally.
Lean towards eternalism 55% odds, for the reason described before.
Theory of reference: causal, deflationary, or descriptive?
No view.
Time travel: metaphysically impossible or metaphysically possible?
Lean towards possible 60% odds for the reasons my friend Chris gives here.
True contradictions: possible but non-actual, impossible, or actual?
Are there certain statements that are both true and false? For instance, the sentence “this sentence is false,” is often thought to be true and false, because if it’s false that it’s false then it’s true but if it’s true that it’s false then it’s false.
Accept impossible: 80% odds. I think that the counterexamples are all weird and have a bunch of proposed solutions. True theories tend to have weird, tricky apparent counterexamples, so I don’t think they’re very good evidence for contradictions. Given that there are an infinite number of propositions, you’d expect some of them to look contradictory.
This is part of a general methodological point: if a principle is very broad, then taking one or two counterexamples to be decisive is irrational, a bit like thee prosecutor’s fallacy. You’d expect true generalizations to have a few seeming counterexamples.
Furthermore in this case, I find the principle way more obvious than anything about the counterexamples. In the liar’s paradox, for instance, I think probably it’s not a proposition for one of the reasons people have said.
Units of selection: genes or organisms?
Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, popularized the idea that we should think of selection as being for genes rather than for organisms. A gene will be passed on if it survives, even if the host doesn’t survive. That’s why, to quote the famous joke, by Haldane “I would gladly give up my life for two brothers or eight cousins.” Caring about one’s close genetic kind is favored by selection, even if one dies, because the genes will survive—carried by ones brethren.
Lean towards genes 55% odds. Dawkins’ argument seems straightforwardly correct and explains much of the evolution of altruism. I’m not more confident mostly because I haven’t followed the debate that carefully.
Values in science (is ideal scientific reasoning necessarily sensitive or insensitive to non-epistemic values?): necessarily value-free, necessarily value-laden, or can be either?
To do science, do you need to have certain values?
Lean towards: necessarily value-laden 60% odds. To do good science, you have to value things like truth and simplicity. Figuring out which scientific theory is right will require certain value judgments about which epistemic values are truth-conducive.
Well-being: desire satisfaction, objective list, or hedonism/experientialism?
Well-being denotes what makes a person’s life good for them. Hedonists answer: one thing, pleasure and not being in pain, where pleasure means any good-feeling experience and pain any bad-feeling experience. Desire theorists answer: getting what you want. Objective list theorists answer: a bunch of stuff including pleasure (usually), relationships (usually), knowledge (sometimes), achievements (sometimes), getting what you want (sometimes), and various other things.
Lean towards hedonism 55% probability, 35% objective list theory, 5% desire satisfactions, 5% other. I think there are powerful arguments for hedonism, but objective list theory isn’t that crazy either and given that theism is decently plausible, I can’t be too confident that objective list theory is false.
Wittgenstein (which do you prefer?): late or early?
Late, for he was nearer to death :).
Great post. You should take this periodically to see how things change.
For the continuum hypothesis, my understanding is that it literally has no truth value because both it and its negation are consistent with standard mathematical set theory or seining. But I’m no expert.
Did you just refer to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) as an "ancient philosopher"?