| Survey Prompt |
Response |
| A priori knowledge |
Accept an alternative view:
If one understands a priori as prior to particular or individualized experience, yes; if prior to experience as such, there is no such thing as far as we know
|
| Abortion |
There is no fact of the matter
|
| Abstract objects |
Accept an alternative view:
Universals exist as concepts at the least; whether they are more than that is an open question inseparable from human purposes and actions (which are real)..
|
| Aesthetic experience |
Accept an alternative view:
aesthetics and 18th century term derived from a Greek root for "feeling." Feeling includes everything on your list --there is no basis for denying the uniqueness of every instance of feeling
|
| Aesthetic value |
Accept an alternative view:
aesthetic value is a refinement of feeling; feeling is basic to all order (I am a pan-experientialist); everything actual has some aesthetic value
|
| Aim of philosophy |
Accept:
wisdom
|
| Analysis of knowledge |
Accept an alternative view:
Of course one can analyze knowledge, but the purposes guide the types of analysis; analysis is not monolithic or value-neutral
|
| Analytic-synthetic distinction |
Accept an alternative view:
Kant's distinction, yes; not all predicates are included in the meaning/analysis of the subject, but some effectively are; the 20th century argument was a waste of time due to logicism
|
| Arguments for theism |
Accept an alternative view:
The "god-function" in metaphysics is the postulate of "the whole"; a necessary postulate for doing metaphysics; it exists as postulated by real beings; thus god is minimally actual; there may be more
|
| Belief or credence |
Accept an alternative view:
false dichotomy; these are the basically the same but defined at different levels of generality for different purposes; credence includes a goodly dose of possibility; belief is narrower
|
| Capital punishment |
Accept an alternative view:
like every act, taking life is irreversible; the state never is compelled to tak this kind of action, and it never can except through the agency of individuals; I would not be the executioner
|
| Causation |
Accept an alternative view:
to evaluate process/production as causal overlays a human purpose on the process (which has a full set of relations to everything real); purpose is intrinsic to the judgment that a process is causal
|
| Chinese room |
Accept an alternative view:
Meaning is not captured in the conditions of the thought experiment; communication is the exchange of meaning, and it does not require human language
|
| Concepts |
Accept an alternative view:
Radical empiricism, which includes both.
|
| Consciousness |
Accept an alternative view:
pan-experientialism
|
| Continuum hypothesis |
Accept an alternative view:
no, because truth is dependent on what people say about things, which is part of how things are, but never the whole of how they are; the continuum is a valuable hypothesis for some purposes
|
| Cosmological fine-tuning |
Accept an alternative view:
The multiverse is a silly and bad hypothesis for dealing with the reality of possibility; I accept brute fact (Firstness)
|
| Eating animals and animal products |
Accept an alternative view:
How we eat is one tiny part of how we live; Whitehead says life is based on robbery (of energies); there is no required or fobidden form of robbery in nature; we should be sensible or we shall perish
|
| Environmental ethics |
Accept an alternative view:
there is no philosophy that does not include and indeed privilege the human perspective; philosophy is human; it is silly to try to leave ourselves out of our attempts to know what to do
|
| Epistemic justification |
Accept an alternative view:
I am a radical empiricist; the internalist/externalist debate is a pseudo-problem
|
| Experience machine |
Accept:
yes
|
| Extended mind |
Accept an alternative view:
Pseudo-problem; mind is real as embodied but clearly is more than brain; open question whether mind is more than we associate with biological life, but it includes all life
|
| External world |
Accept an alternative view:
I call my view analogical realism; it recognizes that the mental is included in reality and changes it, but is not identical with the whole of order itself
|
| Footbridge |
Accept an alternative view:
One ought not set down ethical principles based on hard cases. Conceptual analysis and intuition pumps are doubtful tools in moral reasoning.
|
| Foundations of mathematics |
Accept an alternative view:
Peirce. mathematics is the science of possibility, caring not a straw for existences
|
| Free will |
Accept an alternative view:
Freedom is a moral evaluation of physical reality; so is causation. there is no issue of compatibility, since both are of the same kind. See my response to moral realism.
|
| Gender |
Accept an alternative view:
Gender exists as a concept at least (remember, I am a conceptualist regarding universals); it may be more than that, but it is not less; I teach Kristeva at one extreme and and Irigaray at the other
|
| Gender categories |
Accept an alternative view:
categories are descriptive in character, not prescriptive or necessary; the descriptions are useful, depending on one's purposes
|
| God |
Accept an alternative view:
atheism is unreasoable, depending upon a claim to know what we don't or that we can't know what we might; there might be a god; the possibility is ineliminable; I see no evidence for or against it
|
| Grounds of intentionality |
Accept an alternative view:
animal/human intentionality is not special; everything real feels and is felt; feeling as fetishized by phenomenologists/philosophers of consciousness is part of a larger whole they never think about
|
| Hard problem of consciousness |
Accept an alternative view:
There is no hard problem unless one localizes consciousness in living organisms, which implies an exclusion of consciousness from non-biological existences; there is no evidence for such exclusion
|
| Human genetic engineering |
Accept an alternative view:
permissable depending on purposes; the evaluation of our purposes is the issue, not the engineering, which we have always done indirectly anyway (e.g., exogamy)
|
| Hume |
Accept an alternative view:
Historicist, common sensism; the skeptical and naturalist readings are anachronistic; see D.W. Linvingston's books
|
| Immortality |
Accept an alternative view:
objective immortality of the past is pretty hard to deny; what once has happened always will have; including what the event meant, but the meaning can be lost to methods of knowing we currently have
|
| Interlevel metaphysics |
Accept an alternative view:
I use all of these ideas, depending on whether my purposes are metaphysical, epistemological, or logical
|
| Justification |
Accept an alternative view:
evidence is contextually dependent and meaningless without considering purposes; evidence is as various as purposes are; it never all hangs together perfectly
|
| Kant |
Accept an alternative view:
the architectonic is Kant's philosophy; this is a pseudo-problem; read what the man actually said
|
| Knowledge |
Accept an alternative view:
radical empiricism: James, Bergson, Whitehead. It is utterly different from classical empiricism
|
| Knowledge claims |
Accept:
contextualism
|
| Law |
Accept an alternative view:
pragmatism (not neo-pragmatism); I reject the attempt to make people moral using the law; law articulates a generalized version of how people already live
|
| Laws of nature |
Accept an alternative view:
There are no "laws" of nature; that is a metaphor; there are patterns, some more stable, some less; these patterns evolve
|
| Logic |
Accept an alternative view:
Peirce; logic is normative, the full range of the study of how we ought to think, including descriptions of all the ways we do; formalization is important but not required
|
| Material composition |
Accept an alternative view:
matter is an abstraction and is best defined as "repetition" (Bergson), which, as far as we know, never actually happens
|
| Meaning of life |
Accept an alternative view:
"Life" is ambiguous here. Meaning is made in action and the residue from action in the past, as projected into the future. Meaning is objectively immortal, once having been, it always will have been.
|
| Mental content |
Accept an alternative view:
see my answer to internalism/externalism in justification; this is just a psychologistic version of that pseudo-problem
|
| Meta-ethics |
Accept an alternative view:
the moral aspect of the universe is real, both as possible and as actual (which is what "real" means), because human beings are a part of the universe and we are real; this is a pseudo-problem
|
| Metaontology |
Accept an alternative view:
analogical realism; it means that we do analogize to a reality of the possible and the actual when we assert propositions
|
| Metaphilosophy |
Accept an alternative view:
Dpends on what one means by "nature"; there is more to nature than your current idea of it; get used to it
|
| Method in history of philosophy |
Accept:
contextual/historicist
|
| Method in political philosophy |
Accept an alternative view:
Ideals play a role in all political theory, even realistic/Machiavellian political theory; no political theory genuinely is reducible to its ideals
|
| Mind |
Accept an alternative view:
False dichotomy. The physical is real (actual and possible); all actuality seems to have a physical correlate; we don't know what is possible w/o the physical and must not rule out what is not known.
|
| Mind uploading |
Accept an alternative view:
Almost no one will forsake embodiment if the body is working; some will upload when the body fails; some will choose death; if choice is present (including an escape clause), there is no deeper issue
|
| Moral judgment |
Accept an alternative view:
all moral judgments depend on pre-cognitive grounds (especially pre-reflective imagination); some are also cognitive, but there is no moral judgment without imagination, which is mostly pre-cognitive
|
| Moral motivation |
Accept an alternative view:
Royce's account of the internal and external meaning of ideas and their linkages; loyalty is the needed sinew
|
| Moral principles |
Accept an alternative view:
all experience is a generalization of patterns in the flux; as experience approaches temporal uniqueness, it loses moral meaning
|
| Morality |
Accept an alternative view:
Naturalism means that everything we think about falls under the concept of "nature." That would include expression, error, and all else; it is idealism. Nature is more than your current idea of it.
|
| Newcomb's problem |
Accept an alternative view:
The paradox misunderstands that possibility is independent of actuality; it attempts to temporalize possibility, which is an error
|
| Normative concepts |
Accept an alternative view:
possibility is prior to actuality metaphysically; choice depends on that order; teach imagination to teach possibility; value, fit, reasons, and duty are all modes of imagination, not of actual choice
|
| Normative ethics |
Accept:
virtue ethics
|
| Other minds |
Accept a combination of answers:
-
Accept
adult humans
-
Accept
cats
-
Accept
fish
-
Accept
flies
-
Accept
worms
-
Accept
plants
-
Accept
particles
-
Accept
newborn babies
-
Lean towards
current AI systems
-
Lean towards
future AI systems
|
| Ought implies can |
Accept an alternative view:
Moral imagination is the ground of the moral quality of acts, and it engages possibilities without direct dependency upon the means of action (can). Both concepts are involved in every moral judgment.
|
| Perceptual experience |
Accept an alternative view:
pan-experientialism; everything intelligible is to be treated as experience; perception is a radical reduction of experience tending to the form of a temporal epoch with a history
|
| Personal identity |
Accept an alternative view:
person is the highest value in the field of actual values; it is not limited to individuals, biological, mental, or otherwise; identity is unnecessary for person to exist
|
| Philosophical knowledge |
Accept:
a lot
|
| Philosophical methods |
Accept a combination of answers:
-
Accept
experimental philosophy
-
Lean against
linguistic philosophy
-
Lean against
intuition-based philosophy
-
Lean towards
empirical philosophy
-
Lean against
conceptual analysis
-
Neutral towards
formal philosophy
-
Lean against
conceptual engineering
-
Accept
radical empiricism
|
| Philosophical progress |
Accept:
a little
|
| Plato |
Accept an alternative view:
all of the positions set out in the dialogues are "Plato's"; extracting one view as "his" view is bad reading; Plato is the greatest of the sophists, convinced us all the others were mere sophists
|
| Political philosophy |
Accept an alternative view:
I am a communitarian personalist; Royce; the community is a person in the primary sense; individuals are persons as a result of the activity of community
|
| Politics |
Accept an alternative view:
socialism and capitalism are entirely compatible; there is nothing anti-capitalist about the distribution of wealth that includes placing a high value on the shared quality of life for communities
|
| Possible worlds |
Accept an alternative view:
access depends on abstraction; open question as to the kind of existence possibilities have, but nearly all possibilities are non-actual
|
| Practical reason |
Accept an alternative view:
pragmatism, which includes all three
|
| Principle of sufficient reason |
Accept an alternative view:
reason is only one factor among those contributing to human knowledge; whether reason exists beyond human purposes is an open question; not all human action is purposive but all reason is purposive.
|
| Proper names |
Accept an alternative view:
there is no important difference between a proper name and any other fully distributed subject term; singulars function as logical universals; they are concepts
|
| Properties |
Accept an alternative view:
I am a neo-Scotian conceptualist about universals; it allows for classes and tropes; no need for transcendent universals, but they aren't denied
|
| Propositional attitudes |
Accept an alternative view:
See my answer to the intentionality question; propositions are just formalized intentions; not all intentions are attitiudes, but all attitudes are intentions
|
| Propositions |
Accept an alternative view:
Collections, constellations, and clusters of possibilities; everything actual is possible, not everything possible is actual. The actual have overlapping hierarchies of nested durational epochs.
|
| Quantum mechanics |
Accept an alternative view:
See my writings on it. None of these is viable. None understands how to handle possibility.
|
| Race |
Accept an alternative view:
See my answer about universals; race exists as a concept at least; it has a history, i.e., as a social concept, as a biological concept, etc.; it may be more than a concept
|
| Rational disagreement |
Accept an alternative view:
it depends on the evidence snd their purposes; the more the purposes converge, the more their judgments should converge
|
| Response to external-world skepticism |
Accept a combination of answers:
-
Reject
dogmatist
-
Accept
pragmatic
-
Accept
contextualist
-
Reject
epistemic externalist
-
Accept
abductive
-
Neutral towards
semantic externalist
|
| Science |
Accept an alternative view:
science is a form of human culture; it cannot be divorced from our purposes; however, our purposes are real
|
| Semantic content |
Accept an alternative view:
all expressions are context dependent, but they transcend initial context (and gain new and wider/narrower contexts) as a result of time, evolution, and history
|
| Sleeping beauty |
Accept an alternative view:
depends on whether the flip is analyzed as possible or actual; possibilitist analysis includes actualist analysis; actualist = 1/2; possibilist is not limited by the two options given
|
| Spacetime |
Accept an alternative view:
The concept of spacetime is dead and was always a mistake. Space(s) are created by variability in the flux; general relativity is theology, not science
|
| Statue and lump |
Accept an alternative view:
Both are abstractions; there are only processes that may, for various reasons, be treated as statues, lumps, or a trillion other "things"
|
| Teletransporter |
Accept an alternative view:
The "laws" of thermodynamics are stable patterns, & as temporal occurrences are non-fungible (they never repeat, never have metaphysical identities); they may be functionally re-created as patterns
|
| Temporal ontology |
Accept an alternative view:
overlapping nested hierarchies of duration as patterns in the flux
|
| Theory of reference |
Accept an alternative view:
reference is the convergence of denotative and connotative functions and has at best contingent relations to possible referents; it is a process subordinate to meaning-creation
|
| Time |
Accept an alternative view:
The flux can be described as A, B, or indeed C or D series (people should finish reading McTaggart). Metaphysics is descriptive; time does not have to be described in dichotomous ways.
|
| Time travel |
Accept an alternative view:
The word "time" is too vague here since "travel" implies some sort of space traversed; the flux does not repeat as far as we know or CAN know; thus the idea of travel "through" it is meaningless
|
| Trolley problem |
Accept an alternative view:
One doesn't form moral principles from conceptual analysis or checking our intuitions about hard cases. This is a waste of time and is killing the relevance of philosophy.
|
| True contradictions |
Accept an alternative view:
contradiction is only one form of opposition; contrariety and sureal; many other modes of exclusion are also real; contradiction requires the opposing terms be at the same level of generality
|
| Truth |
Accept an alternative view:
Truth telling is the ground of truth; just as reference is subordinate to meaning, truth is a function of non-truth (not untruth); if one cannot deceive/dissemble/err, one cannot tell the truth
|
| Units of selection |
Accept an alternative view:
ecosystems; genes are an abstration from a process, not entities;
|
| Vagueness |
Accept:
metaphysical
|
| Values in science |
Accept an alternative view:
all reasoning is sensitive to (and includes) non-epistemic values; science is no exception
|
| Well-being |
Accept an alternative view:
consistent ability of the present person to interpret the past person to the future person, both individuals and communities
|
| Wittgenstein |
Accept an alternative view:
I favor pragmatic and relational versions of Wittgenstein, ones that recall Whitehead's influence (which went far deeper than Russell's); relations are primary for W, always were; Hintikka gets that
|
| Zombies |
Accept a combination of answers:
-
Lean towards
conceivable but not metaphysically possible
-
Reject
inconceivable
-
Accept
metaphysically possible
-
Accept
the zombies of Caribbean ritual magic are actual, hence possible; undead? conceivable, probably metaphysically impossible
|
