One of the most interesting and useful things Phil Papers did was conduct a massive survey of professors and PhDs in philosophy. I will here provide how I’d have answered on that survey myself, and compare it to all respondents with PhDs in philosophy, and the narrower categories of other atheists or theists, and the hundreds of established faculty they targeted for the most reliable survey answers. In reporting them I will round all percentages down to the nearest whole percentile, and won’t bother mentioning when target faculty and all qualified philosophers differed by fewer than three percentiles.

You can probably find the basis and justifications and reasons for all my positions in my book Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism, or also by searching my blog for the philosophical subject you are interested in (using either the search field with any keywords, or the categories drop down menu, or both). I’ll only be brief as to my reasons here, just enough to explain my position.

Here we go…

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• A Priori Knowledge: 68% of philosophers (and 71% of target faculty) answered “accept or lean toward a yes,” 21% (and 18% of target faculty) answered “accept or lean toward no.” Theists more often answered yes (84%). And 9% of philosophers rejected the question in one way or another.

My own answer is actually No. But I probably would have answered “The question is too unclear to answer” (along with 4% of other philosophers). Because I think most philosophers would mistake this as asking whether analytical truths exist, things we can prove from semantic arguments alone—like that no bachelors are married or that one plus one equals two, the latter always being true once you accept certain definitions of the words “one,” “plus,” “equals,” and “two.” And I agree such truths exist. But I reject the assumption that that entails such knowledge is properly a priori, as in, “prior to” and thus not at all dependent on experience.

Evidently contrary to most philosophers, I notice that what philosophers call analytical or a priori knowledge is actually still dependent on experience for their truth: the experience of the mental space that conceives and analyzes them, without which we could never know whether they were true. If you cannot define a thing, or cannot comprehend what its definition means, then you cannot know whether any proposition about it is true. Knowledge thus always derives from experience—even when the only experiences it derives from are in the theatre of the mind (see Epistemological End Game).

• Abstract Objects: Platonism or Nominalism? 40% of philosophers “accept or lean toward nominalism,” and 36% Platonism. But 22% rejected the paradigm. Theists were more often Platonists (61%). But even atheists lean slightly more toward Platonism than nominalism (46% vs. 42%).

My own answer is Nominalist. I might have answered “Reject both,” given that philosophers tend to attach too much baggage to the term “Nominalist,” often rendering it inaccurate; but I think I’m close enough even to their incorrect conceptions of nominalism to claim it. I am in fact an Aristotelian realist. I hold that abstractions are simply what is true of all particulars, whether actual or potential particulars.

In other words, an abstraction like “triangle” is just a proposition about what is true of all three-sided polygons, actual ones and ones that could exist if we physically arranged things to manifest them. We define what it is we want to talk about, and examine what’s therefore true of all instantiations of it. Therefore nothing else need exist for abstractions to exist than the sum of all actual and potential particulars. Thus Platonism is simply an error, mistakenly thinking something “else” needs to exist, an error born of the way human brains operate in constructing imaginary objects (see The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism). I therefore believe mathematical truths are both invented and discovered (in the same way moral truths are, though moral truths require information outside the theatre of the mind: see How Can Morals Be Both Invented and True?).

• Aesthetic Value: Objective or Subjective? 40% of philosophers “accept or lean toward: objective,” and 36%, subjective; 23% rejected the paradigm. Theists far more often leaned toward objective (67%). Atheists lean slightly more toward subjective than objective (43% vs. 41%).

My own answer is actually Subjective. But I might have responded “Accept an intermediate view,” insofar as I agree there are biologically objective features of aesthetic experience, but biology is largely arbitrary (and when isn’t, is only channeled toward certain outcomes by accidents of history, like what plants just “happen” to be edible or not, or what visual patterns just “happen” to be useful to respond to or not). I would normally understand an unqualified assertion of “objective aesthetics” as asserting beauty and ugliness are inherently written into the makeup of the cosmos, possibly even by an ultimate dictating Mind (like, say, God), and we only “discover” or “attune” ourselves to them. That’s precisely the view I reject.

Aesthetics are predominately subjective in the obvious sense that each individual develops their own aesthetic sensibilities from random interactions of their environment, personal decisions, and genetics (thus “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”). Aesthetics is only objective in one sense: there are some human universals within aesthetic appreciation and experience, produced by our common biology, but they are not “universal” beyond our species, and even within our species have been produced entirely by happenstance. They might have adaptive uses (it is useful to humans to be attracted or repelled by certain smells, for example), but even those uses, and corresponding adaptations, won’t be “true” in any sense outside the accidents of our biology.

For example, all humans can probably experience beauty in rhythm. But most animals cannot experience rhythm (some birds are among the few known animals who like us can). To other animals, rhythms will just sound like indistinct noise, and generate no aesthetic response, or possibly even irritation. Similarly, humans can experience the pleasure of many citrus-based scents; cats find them disgusting. But these differences, though “objectively” assigned to us from the accident of sharing a species, are nevertheless, cosmically, entirely arbitrary—there is no “cosmic” sense in which either humans or cats are “right” about citrus or drumbeats (see, for example, Musical Aesthetics). This exposes the difference between “objective” and “universal,” and between “universal” to within a particularly evolved species, and “cosmically true” (analogously to moral facts: see Objective Moral Facts for further discussion).

• Analytic-Synthetic Distinction: Yes or No? 61% of philosophers “accept or lean toward yes,” 28% no. Slightly more target faculty leaned yes. Atheists even more so (65%). Theists even more than that (71%). Only 9% of philosophers didn’t accept the paradigm.

I’m definitely a Yes. Analytically, some sentences are true or false solely owing to the meaning of the terms (“All bachelors are unmarried”); synthetically, some are true or false depending on what exists in the world independently of that (“There are bachelors”). The one challenge to the distinction, leveled by Quine in the 1960s, erroneously confused mixed or variable sentences as counterexamples. Just because I can decide whether a sentence is asserting an analytical or a synthetic truth does not mean there is no difference between them; obviously, the meaning of the sentence changes whichever I pick, and it can only mean one or the other at the same time. Likewise, that part of a sentence is analytical and another part synthetic; it’s still the case that no part of the sentence can be both, nor can any part be neither.

• Epistemic Justification: Internalism or Externalism? 43% of philosophers “accept or lean toward externalism,” 26% against. But a whopping 30% reject that whole paradigm for one reason or another. These numbers were dragged toward internalism, however, by a number of dissenting theists (34% of whom favor internalism), likely “reformed epistemologists.” Otherwise, even most theists prefer externalism (48%), and atheists even more so (52%).

Ironically my own answer here is actually Internalist. However, I suspect the philosophers answering “externalist” are confused about what is actually being asked. I suspect they think the question is about whether we need evidence to believe things. But it’s not “we can only be justified in believing things based on evidence that comes from outside of us” (which for all non-analytical truths is indeed correct), the question is actually whether “we can only be justified in believing things about external facts by those external facts” and that’s manifestly not true. Because we never, ever have access to those facts. We only ever have access to what’s in our mind. What warrants believing a thing is entirely internal to us, even if it depends in some sense on there being certain things external to us. For the latter is always our hypothesis about how our sense impressions and memories and so forth came about; and that hypothesis cannot circularly be proved true by assuming it’s true.

That I am persuaded by something in my mind—including perceptions, memories of perceptions, information I believe I have received about others’ perceptions and memories of perceptions—comes entirely from the contents of my mind. This includes my belief that some of this information comes from or is caused by external facts. Obviously I don’t think we can be warranted in believing whatever we want, regardless of what actually exists outside of us; I don’t think external facts are irrelevant to knowledge. But how we conclude we are justified in believing that there is some particular thing that exists outside of us depends entirely on information assembled and experienced internally to our consciousness. And it’s literally, logically impossible it could ever be any other way. Even a God can never be absolutely certain their every experience wasn’t caused by a Cartesian demon or in some other way erroneous.

This means one can be fully justified in believing something that is false. “Mistaken knowledge” is obviously a thing (see The Gettier Problem). Therefore if knowledge is “justified true belief” then the only knowledge humans ever have is of the probability that their beliefs are true. As epistemic probability is always the probability given what we know (a straightforwardly internalist condition); and as it is never total, always includes in the converse the possibility of being wrong (e.g. I can fully consistently say “I am 99% certain my car is in my garage” even when my car is not in my garage, as I am including the latter condition in the converse probability of 1%). Otherwise, knowledge can never exist—because you are never in a position of knowing what’s true, independently of your conclusion as to the probability of its being true. Certainty never exists (except in very limited cases: see Epistemological End Game).

• External World: Idealism, Skepticism, or Non-Skeptical Realism? 76% of philosophers “accept or lean toward non-skeptical realism,” and only 6% idealism and 7% skepticism. 9% reject the paradigm. When you look at target faculty, it’s 81% for realism and only 4% for idealism or skepticism. Among atheists, it’s 86% realism, only 2% idealism.

Obviously, it’s Non-Skeptical Realism for me. Hardly requires further exposition.

• Free Will: Compatibilism, Libertarianism, or No Free Will? 55% of philosophers (and 59% target faculty; and 67% of atheists) accept or lean toward compatibilism; but only 16% libertarianism (and among target faculty, that drops to 13%; among atheists, it drops to 11%) and only 12% think there’s no free will. 14% reject the whole paradigm. Of course 44% of theists prefer a libertarian account of free will; only 35% are compatibilists.

Obviously, it’s Compatibilism for me (see Dennett vs. Harris on Free Will). If you want to really sink your teeth into this one, you can take my online course exploring the real science and philosophy of free will in any coming month (one of which starts tomorrow!), and pose all the questions and challenges you want.

• God: Theism or Atheism? 69% of philosophers accept or lean toward atheism; only 16%, theism. A mere 6% are agnostic or undecided. Among target faculty theism is even less popular: 72% to 14% (and 5% agnostic). While roughly 13% reject the paradigm.

Obviously, it’s Atheism for me (see Bayesian Counter-Apologetics, The God Impossible, and Misunderstanding the Burden of Proof).

• Knowledge Claims: Contextualism, Relativism, or Invariantism? 41% of philosophers accept or lean toward contextualism, 29% accept or lean toward invariantism, only 4% toward relativism. 25% rejected the paradigm. No data for atheism vs. theism.

I probably would have answered “Insufficiently familiar with the issue” at the time (other than, of course, to assert that I reject Relativism, obviously). Or possibly “There is no fact of the matter” or “The question is too unclear to answer.” Or maybe even “Accept an intermediate view.” All of which ironically probably makes me a Contextualist, in the one sense that I believe what a person claims to know when they claim to know something does depend on what that person thinks they mean when they make that claim. I noted something similar in my mention of Quine above.

For example, I would solve the paradox of someone asserting “I don’t know I’m not a brain in a vat” but refusing to admit that therefore “I don’t know if I have hands” by noting that words know “know” or even “have” have changed meaning between these two sentences. In fact we do “know” we are “probably” not brains in a vat (see my blanket point about Cartesian Demons), and as I noted above, knowledge as to the probability of things is the only actual knowledge we can ever have (with but few exceptions, none of which relevant to this example). And we can “have hands” in more than one sense (the directly realist sense; but also in the functional sense).

So when someone says they “don’t know” they’re not a brain in a vat, what they actually mean is they are not “absolutely certain” of that or that they don’t know how to prove it’s unlikely but nevertheless believe it’s unlikely. Whereas when asked about their hands, people tend to apply immediate sensory information to confirm they have hands in a fully functional sense—which sense would be true (they do have hands) even if they are a brain in a vat (see my discussion of this point in Sense and Goodness without God, “Meaning, Reality, and Illusion” II.2.1.2, pp. 31-32). For instance, when playing a VR game, sentences about whether “I have hands” or not could be a function of whether the avatar I am playing has hands or not, which is actually identical to a brain-in-the-vat sense of having hands. So clearly I see context as resolving these things. Which I guess makes me a contextualist. Though that should not be taken to entail I endorse any particular version of contextualism or every assertion made by every contextualist.

• Knowledge: Empiricism or Rationalism? Philosophers surprisingly seem stumped by this question, being evenly split: only 38% “accept or lean toward empiricism,” 26% rationalism, and 35% reject the paradigm. Of that latter group, 18% “accept both” or “an intermediate view,” and 7% said the question is “too unclear to answer.” Among atheists, though, the split was 44% empiricists, 31% rationalists. Theists: 30% empiricists, 50% rationalists. No surprise there.

I would probably have answered at the time, “Accept an intermediate view.” But I now know my actual position is fully Empiricist. And I think many of the philosophers who answered “Rationalist” or some other variant are confused (as I once was) about what counts as “Experience.” There is a false assumption that this means only “sensory experience” but that’s obviously not true. All mental content (emotions, thoughts, feelings, impressions) constitutes a form of experience, and there really is no meaningful distinction to be made as to that fact. Indeed, we could even call it sensory experience—since consciousness is no different from any other constructed perceptual domain, the only difference being the “eye” of the cerebral cortex is turned on the internal operations of the brain itself, which are then interpreted into a construct of conscious experience. Once you accept this, it no longer makes sense to assert any form of Rationalism, since that’s just a confusion over which set of experiences we are referring to. It’s experiences all the way down.

• Laws of Nature: Humean or Non-Humean? 51% of philosophers accept or lean toward “non-Humean,” 28% Humean, and 20% rejected the paradigm. Among target faculty it’s even starker: 57% non-Humean, and 24% Humean. Among atheists even more so: 62% non-Humean. Theists yet more so: 70% non-Humean.

I generally find the distinction confused and incoherent (Hume didn’t actually advocate the view often attributed to him), so I’d probably at the time have answered “Reject both.” But if I accept people’s mistaken view of what Hume said, I could perhaps have answered “non-Humean.”

I regard laws of nature as the inevitable outcome of the arrangement of things. For example, inverse square laws are simply what happen when quantities are spread over progressively larger areas in a three dimensional space. The only way to “change” that would be to change the quantities (e.g. the Strong Force, which gets stronger over distance, does so because the more one tugs on the force the more that energy is converted into more gluons, multiplying the strong force, so the quantity is increasing rather than being spread out; it otherwise does obey an inverse square law) or to change the space through which it spreads (into two or eight dimensions or whatever) or to change how it spreads (randomly, like an open explosion, or in a focused way, like a laser).

This means I do not assert, as many Humeans do, that laws of physics are “nothing more” than observed regularities or correlations, nor do I assert, as most “necessitarians” do, that laws of physics are “just” the irreducible properties of things (or otherwise magically inherent in the universe). Nor are they instructions things “obey.” They are the emergent outcome of the interactions of things as constructed, probably ultimately the product of geometry (see, for example, Superstring Theory as Metaphysical Atheism and All Godless Universes Are Mathematical). As such, once you have arranged the geometry of a system, it is logically impossible for laws of physics to be different than they are; but that does not mean it is logically impossible to have different laws of physics. The latter can be accomplished by simply changing the geometry of the system (e.g. adding a fourth or subtracting the third spatial dimension will change inverse square laws into something else).

So, contrary to the view some attribute to Hume, I believe laws of physics are caused to be what they are (and thus are contingent on underlying physical realities, which we can discover, thus explaining those laws). But contrary to some non-Humeans, I do not believe laws of physics are magically inherent in anything, or impossible to change. They are emergent outcomes of physical contingencies, and thus will change if those contingencies do. Consequently, I do not find the Humean/non-Humean dichotomy to be useful.

• Logic: Classical or Non-Classical? 48% of philosophers (and 51% of target faculty) accept or lean toward “classical,” 17% non-classical. 33% reject the distinction. No data for atheists or theists.

My answer here is probably “Accept both,” so I’d be in the “reject paradigm” group again. I accept classical logics, but don’t reject non-classical logics. All logics are invented tools. They are just different ways of describing and exploring a concept space. Ultimately they cannot contradict each other, because any attempt to translate a statement in one logic into another logic would end up saying the same thing in both logics, the difference merely being which components are called axioms; and which, premises.

Statements in non-classical logic translated into classical logic can become highly convoluted, which is why non-classical logics even exist: they simply make it easier to navigate different sets of assumptions. An example I talk about often is Bayesian logic: standard Aristotelian logic actually can’t straightforwardly handle probabilities; to construct a valid probabilistic argument with it requires fairly convoluted systems of syllogisms, such that it’s just easier to use Bayes’ Theorem, treating its inputs as premises and its outputs as conclusions. But as Russell and Whitehead famously showed a century ago, the one can always be reduced to the other—if you wanted to do that; it’s usually of no use to, but it is epistemologically relevant that you can. So, too, all other logics.

• Mental Content: Internalism or Externalism? 48% of philosophers are externalists (but only 42% of target faculty), 22% internalists (but 26% of target faculty). 28% reject the paradigm, e.g. 6% accept an intermediate view, 5% weren’t familiar enough with the issue, 4% were agnostic or undecided, 4% accepted both, and so on. Of atheists, 62% are externalists, 23% internalists. Theists shift a little the other way, 52% externalist and 34% internalist.

At the time I might have answered “Insufficiently familiar with the issue.” Now, I am definitely an Internalist. I believe the dispute is the result of semantic confusion; and externalists are not attending to scientific or historico-linguistic reality in the forming of their ideas about this. All our assertions acquire all their meaning from information internal to us. Yes, that information might be caused by external facts or reference external facts; but that’s not relevant to the question posed here. Regardless of how we came by that information, what we mean when we say things is entirely 100% decided by the information in our brains, without remainder. Because we literally don’t know anything else, so we cannot be asserting anything else.

For instance, an externalist would say that “other substances” with all the same properties of water are “not really” water, in the sense that if in 235 A.D. Galen had referred to two pots, one filled with water and the other (unbeknownst to him) with “twin-water” (something that wasn’t H2O but otherwise identical to him), as both “water,” he’d be in some sense wrong. But of course that’s unintelligible. On what basis would we say which pot was the “real” water? And what in Galen’s statement asserts any such difference? Obviously the content of Galen’s assertion is the same regardless of which pot we are talking about.

If later Galen discovered the difference, obviously he would simply classify each kind of water as a type of water. And lo and behold, that has in fact happened: philosophers pontificating on this question are often scientifically illiterate, and don’t know that there are in fact several different types of water, that weigh different amounts or freeze at different temperatures or have other slightly different properties (e.g. heavy water vs. light water vs. everyday water), yet we all comfortably refer to them all as “water” (the water we usually drink, for example, is a mixture of them all) and don’t wring our hands over which one we should call “twin water” or whatever such nonsense. Analogously, we use words like “earth” and “rock” and “air” and “wood” quite comfortably to mean things of similar properties but different composition.

How we are assigning words here is entirely internalist: we are simply assigning code names to patterns of data. “Water” was not assigned based on water being H2O but on other pattern-data. There is no logically necessary sense in which “water,” as our word has always been assigned, had to have turned out to all be H2O. It could very well have turned out to be all sorts of different things, just as “rock” and “air” did. That it’s all H2O was simply an accident of cosmic history. But in fact, it’s not all H2O simpliciter. What we call water has turned out to be H2O, D2O and T2O. Three different substances. Yes, they are very similar. But they might not have been. And that would have made no difference to our use of the word “water” or our concepts about water (such as whether it “quenches thirst” or “puts out fires” or “usually freezes somewhere near zero degrees Celsius” and so on).

• Meta-Ethics: Moral Realism or Moral Anti-Realism? 56% of philosophers are moral realists; 28%, anti-realists. 15% reject the paradigm. 59% of atheists are moral realists, 32% anti-realists. Of course, 81% of theists are moral realists; only 15%, anti-realists.

I am of course a Moral Realist (see The Real Basis of a Moral World). But it’s notable that so are most atheist philosophers, refuting the common theist assumption that we’re all wishy-washy relativists or something.

• Metaphilosophy: Naturalism or Non-Naturalism? 50% of philosophers are naturalists; 26%, non-naturalists; 23% reject the paradigm. Of course, 63% of atheists are naturalists and only 22% not; and it’s the other way around for theists: 60% non-naturalists, 25% naturalists (which leads me to wonder if that 25% are actually nontheists using “god” as a metaphor or some other silly thing).

I am of course a Naturalist (see Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them and The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism; and, of course, Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism).

• Mind: Physicalism or Non-Physicalism? 54% of philosophers are physicalists; 28% non; and 16% reject the paradigm (e.g. 5% think “the question is too unclear to answer,” 2% are undecided, 2% “accept an intermediate view,” and so on). Of course, 68% of atheists are physicalists; only 21% not; and theists flip the other way, with 63% non-physicalists and again 25% physicalists (is that those same fake theists again?).

I am of course a Physicalist (see The Mind Is a Process Not an Object: On Not Understanding Mind-Brain Physicalism).

• Moral Judgment: Cognitivism or Non-Cognitivism? 62% of philosophers lean toward moral cognitivism (65% of targeted faculty); 18%, non-cognitivism; and 18% rejected the paradigm (5% were too unfamiliar to take a position; 4% took an “intermediate view”; etc.). Among atheists moral cognitivism has 71% support; among theists, 78%.

I probably would have answered this one “The question is too unclear to answer,” because it confuses “judgment” with “justification,” i.e. how humans in actual practice decide moral questions (descriptive ethics), and what actually justifies those choices (prescriptive ethics). In terms of justification, moral truth is cognitive, as cognitive as anything else (there are moral facts, and we can discover them empirically, and consciously justify them thereby: see, again, The Real Basis of a Moral World). But in terms of judgment, obviously psychology and cognitive science have well established that moral judgment is mostly non-cognitive: people react intuitively and don’t really sit down to examine whether their moral intuitions are correct, warranted, or justifiable.

And this should partly always be the case, since cognitive analysis of every moral decision is impossible. But one’s intuitions that they rely on for their non-cognitive judgments should be trained to align with cognitively defensible standards and principles (see Your Own Moral Reasoning: Some Things to Consider). Which makes moral reasoning both cognitive and non-cognitive. But the difference relates to how we must apply moral values in practice vs. what makes those moral values that we are intuitively applying correct or true. I am a Moral Cognitivist in the latter respect, and I think that’s how other philosophers were answering as well.

• Moral Motivation: Internalism or Externalism? Philosophers disagree a lot about this one: 36% are for internalism; 29%, externalism; and 34% reject the paradigm (e.g., 14% were too unfamiliar with the issue; 5% undecided; and the rest thought the distinction was in various ways invalid or unclear). No data for atheists & theists.

Possibly this one is confusing to answer because the difference and its significance is hard to grasp. I’m an internalist. However, I also accept that people can be in a cognitive state of mismatch between intellectual and emotional assent to a proposition—which can easily be confused with externalism, the view that only external facts can be motivating.

For instance you could have a fear of flying and then, after researching the matter, intellectually conclude air travel is actually safer than driving, while still fearing flying more than driving; and you’d be fully aware this is not a rational state to be in, yet that knowledge does not change anything. This represents a state of being superficially aware of the truth, but not fully integrating acceptance of that truth into your emotional apparatus. That looks like externalism. But it’s not. It’s simply the difference between superficial assent to a truth, and actual acceptance of a truth. This is born of the way brains evolved: their earlier decisional apparatus was emotional; our rational, cognitive matrix was added on later, and being a late-comer and mere add-on, the two do not communicate well.

It’s clear that once one actually accepts the truth of a thing (e.g. “air travel is safer”), that will itself be sufficient to cause the expected change in emotional state (you will no longer fear flying). And in fact, nothing else could have this effect. The only way to change your emotional response to a thing, is through a full (rather than superficial) cognitive acceptance of the corresponding facts. The emotional brain must accept the proposition is true. Which is difficult because the emotional brain is pre-cognitive: it cannot entertain propositions at all. The concepts captured by a proposition must soak into it instead. And we have no switch for that (we can’t just “think” or “command” our brains to do that). It takes time, reflection, and habituation. Which is really internalist: the full acceptance of a fact, will supply all associated motivations.

In the moral domain, you can intellectually agree certain things are true (e.g. “I need to be more compassionate to more fully experience an internally satisfying life”) but that won’t necessarily have “re-engineered” the intuitive-emotional part of your brain (from which motivation actually emerges) to agree. But once that has reached a state of agreement (once you have, as Aristotle suggested, habituated a more compassionate mindset into your emotional brain), it will be sufficiently self-motivating—such a complete realization will fully motivate you to continue that course. Thus all “ought” statements reduce to “is” statements about what you really want out of life, what sort of person you really want to be (and what the actual differential effects are of cultivating different values and principles of conduct). Moral motivation is therefore not automatic, but remains internal. Moral truth is decided, ultimately, by what you, internally, really want.

As I wrote in “Moral Facts Naturally Exist (and Science Could Find Them)” in The End of Christianity (p. 343):

Only “internalist” moral systems come with sufficient motives to care about them and thus to prefer obeying them to other competing moral systems (because that’s what distinguishes internalism from externalism in the first place: an intrinsic motive to obey). And only one such system can be true. Because if [some particular moral system] M obtains what we most want, there is then by definition no other system that we will have sufficient motivating reason to prefer to M.

All other systems (which do not provide a sufficiently motivating reason to care about them) are equally uncompelling: none that contradicts M has any greater claim on our obedience than any other, and as such they cancel each other out, leaving M as the only thing that we in actual fact ought to do. And this is not a novel conclusion. Bernard Williams has already proven that externalism must either be incoherent or just a disguised redux of internalism or simply false in the sense that it provides no sufficient motive to be moral and is thus overrun by any system that does provide such motive. In effect, moralists might want to “call” their externalist systems “the true morality,” but such a claim is vacuous because we will still have a better reason to do something else instead.

But because the human brain is a kluge and thus not rationally engineered, it does not behave in any straightforward way as intended to be captured by the “internalism/externalism” debate. It conforms to neither. But when you analyze how it actually does behave, it becomes clear that moral truth derives from motivations that are inherent in the justifications of that moral truth. Thus, ultimately, at our deepest level of reasoning, moral motivation is internalist. But it can look externalist to someone unfamiliar with the incoherent operation of actual human brains.

• Newcomb’s Problem: One Box or Two Boxes? 55% of philosophers rejected the question (33% were too unfamiliar with it; 10% undecided; most of the rest didn’t give any clear answer). But 25% said “two boxes” and 19% said “one” (though 31% of target faculty took both!). Interestingly atheists and theists reacted differently. Atheists were 48% likely to take both boxes, and only 28% the one. Whereas theists were almost the other way around: 40% take the one box, and 31% both. I’d be curious to know why atheists and theists differ here.

They probably put this question on the survey because it has generated such confident disagreement among philosophers as to baffle the field entirely. The basic idea is this: a wizard places before you two boxes, one opaque and one transparent; in the latter you can always see $1000 in cash waiting for you to claim; in the other, the wizard assures you there will be $1,000,000 if and only if he predicted that you will choose that box alone (leaving the $1000 behind). You have ample ground to believe the wizard is very reliable in predicting what you will do (e.g. you’ve seen a hundred runs of this same experiment with other people and the wizard was always right). So what do you do?

I’d only take the opaque box with the million dollars I’m told will be within; and forgo the visible thousand dollars. So I’d have answered “one box.” Probably the best analysis of this problem I’ve ever read is in Gary Drescher’s book Good and Real. But it’s hard to briefly explicate. Basically, he connects it to the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the objective of realizing your ideal self even in ignorance of any guaranteed effects of doing so. The upshot is, insofar as the game is played based on predictions generated from your ideal self, you can only actually be your ideal self by acting like it, therefore you should always hew to the prediction. As such it is related to the magic pill dilemma in moral theory (on which see my analysis in Goal Theory Update).

I can only assume the philosophers who take both boxes aren’t thinking the scenario through, or are “fabricating” details not actually in the scenario (like the ability to cheat) and thus not actually responding to it. In other words, they are failing to conduct the thought experiment correctly—a common error among philosophers (see On Hosing Thought Experiments). In the scenario as posed, you have no reason believe the wizard is unreliable. So you always stand to make a larger expected return forgoing the thousand dollars. Because if they guess wrongly that you’ll take both, you’ll only get a thousand; whereas if they guessed you’ll take only the opaque box, there will always be a million dollars in there. And if you are the sort of person who would forego a thousand for a million (as most people are), you will do so. So you can be assured, to a fairly high probability, there will indeed be a million dollars there, and only if you take the one box. The irony of this is how many philosophers get this wrong, thus proving (contrary to sense) that they aren’t the sort of people who would forego a thousand for a million. But the wizard now knows that, thanks to the PhilPapers Survey. There won’t be any million dollars for them. Whereas that wizard also now knows what I would do. So I’ll be getting a million dollars. What about you?

By contrast, arguments for “both boxes” are always fatally flawed—to the extent that I wonder if one can predict the quality of a philosopher by whether they fail at this problem. For example, one common argument is: If after the wizard has filled the boxes I have a friend who saw what the wizard did and they could communicate with me, what would his advice be? Surely it would be to take both boxes. Therefore, we should take both boxes. This is erroneous. Of course, this has already changed the scenario, so you are now making decisions based on information that in fact you don’t have (there is no friend telling you this), and that’s stupid. Worse, even in this new scenario, our friend will almost never, if ever, see that result; and thus you will almost never, if ever, get that advice from them. Because the wizard will have predicted you’d heed their advice, and thus not fill the box.

In this “new” version of Newcomb’s problem, where you now get to cheat by sending a friend in to spy on the setup (which is not Newcomb’s problem), only if the wizard predicted you would not heed your friend’s advice, will he fill the box. So it again becomes simply a debate over how reliable the wizard is at predicting your behavior. And in the scenario as posed, that reliability is very high. So it comes down to how consistently you wish to realize your ideal self. If inconsistently, the wizard will know never to fill the box, and you’ll now know that about yourself. There will never be a million dollars for you. Which your friend will always confirm. But if you genuinely believe in striving to realize your best self, such that the wizard correctly predicts you’ll forgo a thousand to get a million even if you could cheat and get both, there will only be a million dollars there precisely because you’d ignore your friend, and the wizard knew that, and now you know that about yourself. Which person would you rather be? The one who knows they always strive to be their best self, or the one who knows they won’t? And which one will the wizard reward? Do the math.

• Normative Ethics: Deontology, Consequentialism, or Virtue Ethics? Philosophers can’t agree here. 30% reject the paradigm; 24% favor consequentialism; 22%, virtue ethics (though only 18% of target faculty); and 22%, deontological ethics. Atheists are slightly more favorable to consequentialism, at 32%; theists hugely favor non-consequentialism, at 81%.

Of course, I could answer “all three” (see Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same), like the 12% of other philosophers who preferred some combination or intermediate view. I could also have sided with 3% of philosophers and answered “other,” insofar as I actually think a fourth, unlisted option is correct: moral facts are hypothetical imperatives (per Philippa Foot). But I could also have answered “Consequentialism,” on the grounds that deonology and virtue ethics are actually, in fact, also consequentialist—as is Foot’s hypotheticalism. These other theories differ from what philosophers sometimes limitedly mean by consequentialism only in which consequences are being considered. But the way PhilPapers framed this question is with a forced trichotimy, and I reject the trichotimy. So regardless, I’d be in the “reject paradigm” group. Probably via an “accept all” response.

In this respect my position here is like my position in epistemology: I think it’s experiences all the way down, and philosophers are just failing to recognize that thoughts and feelings are experiences (indeed, as science now concludes, experiences of one’s inner states). Similarly, in moral theory, I think it’s consequences all the way down, and philosophers are just failing to recognize that all the justifiers of deontological and virtue ethics are also consequences. And since we should be taking into account all consequences when evaluating moral norms, any correct moral theory must integrate all three moral perspectives into a unified theory of morality.

• Perceptual Experience: Disjunctivism, Qualia Theory, Representationalism, or Sense-Datum Theory? 29% of philosophers went for representationalism; 13%, qualia theory; 12%, disjunctivism; 4%, sense-datum theory. But a whopping 41% of philosophers rejected the question: 16% being too unfamiliar with the options; 7% undecided; and about 11% rejecting the dichotomy presented in one way or another; etc. Atheists mostly preferred representationalism (46%); theists mostly rejected it (58%).

I would have answered “The question is too unclear to answer.” Because these are not properly dichotomous options, nor even close to exhaustive depending on what they thought they were asking. Representationalist theories of qualia are quite common in the field, for example. And sense-datum theory gets some things right that representationalism gets wrong, and vice versa. Meanwhile disjunctivism is barely intelligible as a theory, and it’s hard to tell in what way it even excludes any of the others.

In fact, I am having a hard time figuring out what the PhilPapers survey is even asking us here. They haven’t framed it as whether we believe qualia exist or don’t exist, for example (I hold they do, but not separably from the physical machinery generating them, and not as objects, but as events), or as what (emergent entities, irreducible entities, non-entities, etc.). Nor have they framed it as whether we are, say, functionalists or dualists or anything else with respect to consciousness.

For what it’s worth, I am a functionalist with respect to the qualia of consciousness. For example, I do not believe it’s possible for two brains to be functionally and structurally identical and experience different qualia. But whether I am or am not a representationalist depends on what that even means. For instance, contrary to some representationalists, the only difference I recognize between a hallucinated tomato and an actual one is what is causing the brain to generate the experience; the experience itself will be identical (in all respects relevant to the point). Likewise, “redness” does not exist outside the invention of our brain. Tomatoes outside our brain are not “red”; they merely absorb and reflect certain frequencies of photon. And none of the photons involved “are red”; some merely vibrate at the right frequency to set up a causal chain of electrical signaling that activates the brain circuit that confabulates an experience to “represent” that fact with a made-up color. Where any of that puts me in the list of options given, beats me.

• Personal Identity: Biological view, Psychological View, or Further-Fact View? 35% of philosophers rejected the paradigm (14% unfamiliar or undecided; roughly 16% preferring some combination or something else altogether). But apart from that, 34% prefer psychology; 18%, biology; 11%, further facts. More atheists prefer psychology (41%); theists not so much (26%). They are, rather, three times more likely than atheists to prefer a “further-fact” view (obviously; you know, souls and all that).

I’d answer “Psychological.” Along with nearly half the other atheists. I don’t believe in further-facts (as only 10% of other atheists do), nor that they are in any way needed to explain causal continuity over time. And biology is incidental (rather like what hardware I’m running my word processor on: doesn’t matter to the content of the book I’m typing), so I disagree with the 20% of atheists who took that position. Identity is a mental pattern with a shared unique causal history. Thus, if I woke up tomorrow converted into an electronic body and brain, I’d still be me, however altered.

The extent to which someone is a “different person” is largely a function of what one means when one asks that question; one can be both the same and a different person at the same time, on different senses of each. Robert Downey Jr. is the “same person” today as starred in 80s films under that name in the strictly causal-historical sense; but he is also a “different person” today than then insofar as he was then a reckless drug addict and today is not. Though there is a biological platform those changes and similarities are being “run” on, the changes and similarities are only relevant in respect to their psychology (who Robert is “as a person”). Like all semantics, we can simply choose what degree of “sameness” matters for any given query, as we please. We merely need to avoid equivocation fallacies when switching among different thresholds of “change.”

• Politics: Communitarianism, Egalitarianism, or Libertarianism? Predictably, 37% of philosophers (41% of target faculty) did not accept the paradigm (15% were unfamiliar or undecided; 19% or so preferred something not listed or some kind of combination). But 33% answered egalitarian, 16% communitarian, and 13% libertarian (which debunks the myth that philosophers are all libertarians; in fact hardly any are). Atheists were more often egalitarian (48%); theists more often communitarian (33%). Atheists were even less likely than average to be libertarian (a mere 11%).

I’d answer “The question is too unclear to answer” or “Accept an intermediate view,” and thus would be in the “reject paradigm” group, since I don’t regard any of these terms to be anywhere adequately or consistently defined, nor together exhaustive of all options, or even properly dichotomous (many an egalitarian is a libertarian, for example; yet others are communitarian). I would not fully identify with any version of any of the three listed political philosophies.

My actual political philosophy, which has changed a little in respect to particulars from what I wrote in Sense and Goodness fifteen years ago (see my Typos Page for notes on that point), is of hybrid equilibrium: we need socialism as a check and balance against the excesses of capitalism, and we need capitalism as a check and balance against the excesses of socialism. The ideal state finds the right equilibrium betweem them, producing a stable, flourishing community for all. I am also firmly in the camp of evidence-based politcs, i.e. political choices cannot be deduced from the armchair through any ideology, but must be based on the actual outcomes of actual policies. Which requires deciding what the goals (the outcome measures) are of a polity. Which as I argue in Sense and Goodness is simply to sustain a functioning civil society that maximizes everyone’s opportunity to build a satisfying life. And which requires collecting and attending to actual, pertinent evidence regarding actionable options (rather than relying on presumptions or mythologies).

• Proper names: Fregean or Millian? 38% of philosophers reject the paradigm (24% unfamiliar or undecided; 10% prefer something else), and the rest are split: 30% for Frege, 30% for Millian. Target faculty prefer Frege (34% to 28%). Atheists prefer Millian (43%). Theists are evenly split (39% either way).

My answer would be “Insufficiently familiar with the issue.” At a glance, the issue seems hopelessly muddled and falsely dichotimized. The answer seems more obviously “either or both depending on context and intent.” Consequently I see no use in this debate yet. Maybe someone can explain to me why it matters.

• Science: Scientific Realism or Scientific Anti-Realism? Most philosophers are realists (70% overall, and 75% of target faculty). As few are anti-realists (15% overall, and only 11% of target faculty) as reject the distinction altogether (14%). Roughly 7% accept some hybrid or alternative; barely 4% claim unfamiliarity or indecision. So this seems one of the most decided questions yet. Atheists, of course, are even more convinced (80% realists; 10% anti-realists). Theists match the avarage for realism (69%), but outnumber everyone in anti-realism (24% anti-realists; who are these guys?).

I’m obviously a Scientific Realist (see, for example, Defending Naturalism as a Worldview as well as All Godless Universes Are Mathematical and Superstring Theory as Metaphysical Atheism).

• Teletransporter (New Matter): Survival or Death? 34% of philosophers are for survival; 31%, death; 33% reject the paradigm in some way (18% were unfamiliar or undecided; 12% think it’s in some way more complicated than the dichotomy posed). No data for atheists & theists.

This is one people get in serious fights over, so I’m glad they included it. I’m for Survival. And note they were clear that this means “new matter” and not disassembly, transport, and reassembly (though why that should matter escapes me, it nevertheless changes people’s answer!). This should have been obvious from my remarks above about identity. The most one might challenge me with is a “but what happens when there are multiple copies of you” and the answer is: then there will be a heretofore unprecedented condition of multiple different people who up to a certain point in time were the same person but followed different (non-unique) paths after that. We don’t have vocabulary for that because it’s never happened (yet).

I should note there could be one confusion here that confounds the answer counts. One could believe that a teletransporter transit constitutes “death and resurrection” (and I’d accept that characterization). So are the philosophers answering “Death” actually saying that (yes, I survive, but, like Jesus, only after dying) or are they taking the position you usually find among lay people that the resurrected version of them is not really them, and they themselves have permanently died? This debate interestingly existed in earliest Christianity: Paul argued we switch bodies (the same way the Heavens Gate Cult imagined recently); but a lot of Christians were uncomfortable with that in the same way some still are with teleportation-by-destruction-and-replacement, leading to a rise in “sarcicist” beliefs: that the raised rise in the same body that died. The Gospels of Luke and John even fabricated their narratives to support the latter camp against Paul (see On Paul’s Theory of Resurrection).

• Time: A-Theory or B-Theory? Most philosophers opted out (61%), mostly because they were unfamiliar with the problem (34%) or undecided about it (9%), and some thought it was incorrectly dichotomized in some way (10%); but 22% sided with B-Theory (in fact, 26% of target faculty) and only 16% with A-Theory.

It’s well known I’m for B-Theory (see The Ontology of Time and my extensive discussion of time in Sense and Goodness). As are pretty much all scientists actually expert in the subject. In short, all time exists already, past and future, and we only feel like we are moving through it. Objectively, we are a four-dimensional person-tube statically existing from beginning to end. But this being the case makes little difference in any practical sense as to how we should live or think; we still can only remember the past and anticipate the future.

• Trolley Problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): Switch or Don’t Switch? 66% of philosophers switch. Only 7% don’t. 26% rejected the question in some way (12% were undecided or unfamiliar; 13% claimed there is another alternative somehow). Atheists are even more convinced: 77% switch; theists are much more squeamish: 24% won’t switch.

I choose Switch. As do most human beings in real life. And, apparently, most philosophers. Variants on the standard problem I might answer differently because they change the social system of the scenario engaged (see On Hosing Thought Experiments and Everything Is a Trolley Problem). The element of analysis that “don’t switchers” miss is in part factual (one’s civic “duty of care” to others changes by circumstance, owing to the social consequences of iterating the same decision to all actors) and part emotional (switching “feels” more like being the cause, when objectively, inaction is equally a cause). U.S. Presidential elections are all trolley problems; which “stay at home” voters all fail (they are all ” no switchers,” in a sense killing five people to avoid taking responsibility for one).

• Truth: Correspondence, Deflationary, or Epistemic? 48% of philosophers side with correspondence; 23%, deflationary; 10% epistemic; 17% “other” (12% unfamiliar or undecided; the rest preferring unstated alternatives).

Of course this is another poorly framed trichotomy (epistemic theories of truth can include correspondence theories, and vice versa). But I’d probably answer Correspondence along with the plurality of other philosophers, owing solely to the fact that the category of “Epistemic” theories of truth is usually characterized as nonrealist or anti-realist, and I am a realist: assertions of truth do impute that the declared states of affairs actually exist. How one accesses knowledge of that truth might then vary (e.g. I think we can only accumulate evidence for the probability of a given truth, in most cases). But as long as you don’t confuse those two things, you can call me a Correspondence Theorist.

• Zombies: Inconceivable, Conceivable but Not Metaphysically Possible, or Metaphysically Possible? 35% of philosophers (and 42% of atheists) favor “conceivable but not metaphysically possible.” Only 24% favor metaphysically possible (and 34% of theists). And 17% favor even their inconceivability. Which really means 52% of philosophers agree, in one way or another, philosophical zombis are impossible. And another 23% opted out of deciding (12% were unfamiliar or undecided; 8% insisted some other option exists).

A “zombie” in this context means a hypothetical person who is in every physical sense identical to you (down to every single neuron and synapse and firing event), and behaves in every way identically to you, but who experiences no qualia (they experience no consciousness).

My answer as to this creature would depend on what one meant by “conceivable.” I think many things we think are conceivable are imaginable but only by forgetting that you aren’t actually imagining the thing as described (see On Hosing Thought Experiments as well as The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism and The Mind Is a Process Not an Object). If I were being strict as to definitions I’d have to answer that zombies are “inconceivable” (because when you think you are conceiving of one, you aren’t really), but if one wanted conceivability to be defined more broadly (to include even erroneous conceptions), I’d still answer “conceivable but not metaphysically possible.” See the linked articles for why.

-:-

That concludes the PhilPapers survey and my responsees thereto. I hope this has been helpful or intriguing. And there has since been an update: see The New 2020 PhilPapers Survey and How I’d Answer the 2020 PhilPapers Survey. For more read my book Sense and Goodness without God, or explore this blog using the “search” box or “categories” menu in the right margin.