[Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We?

Thanks for the clarifications, without them the questions made little sense to me. (Well, with them most polls appear poorly defined false dichotomy, but at least this unfortunate fact becomes clear).

If you don't understand a question, I'm fairly certain that if you scroll down far enough you'll find a comment from me with an attempt at explication.

Unfortunately, I didn't on the libertarianism/egalitarianism one. (I had a plausible guess, but I wanted to be sure that guess was right.)

While that improves the situation, we're still trusting that the PhilPapers respondents' beliefs about the terms perfectly match the definitions you posted. Too bad we can't survey both groups ourselves (or something).

Excellent point. I'll add a glossary to the article sometime within the next 24 hours in order to diminish some of the confusion.

It would be interesting to have "how well do you think you understand the question?" parallel to each question. I'd imagine less consistency on questions where most participants had to look up the terms on Wikipedia prior to answering.

I won't object to people attaching polls to my poll comments, but I won't make a precommitment to making use of them in my analysis of the results.

Consequentialism: The morality of actions depends only on their consequences.

Deontology: There are moral principles that forbid certain actions and encourage other actions purely based on the nature of the action itself, not on its consequences.

Virtue ethics: Ethical theory should not be in the business of evaluating actions. It should be in the business of evaluating character traits. The fundamental question of ethics is not "What makes an action right or wrong?" It is "What makes a person good or bad?"

All three in weighted combination, with consequentialism scaling such that it becomes dominant in high-stakes scenarios but is not dominant elsewhere. I believe that consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics are mutually reducible and mutually justifying, but that flattening them into any one of the three is bad because it raises the error rate, by making some values much harder to describe and eliminating redundancy in values that would have protected them from corruption.

I lean toward Consequentialism but I support something like deontology/virtue ethics for reasons of personal computability.

How should we vote for "rule consequentialism"?

I went for "Lean toward consequentialism" though it is arguably a form of deontology. "Other" is not very precise.

I accept consequentialism but I also believe that "acting like I'm following virtue ethics" tends to have the best consequences.

Voted for "lean toward consequentialism". As someone once put, I consider the “fundamental” rules to be consequentialist¹, but some of the approximations I use because the fundamental rules are infeasible to calculate from scratch every time resemble deontology or virtue ethics, much like QFT and GR are time-reversal symmetric but thermodynamics isn't. Also, ethical injunctions (i.e. fudge factors in my prior probability that certain behaviours will harm someone to compensate for cognitive biases) and TDT-like game-/decision-theoretical considerations make some of my choices resemble deontology, and a term in my utility function for how awesome I am make some of my choices resemble virtue ethics.

1. I assume that, despite the name, people here don't take consequentialism to imply strictly CDT. I still think that in the True Prisoner's Dilemma against a paperclip maximizer known to use the same decision algorithms as ourselves it's immoral to defect.

Depends again on the level of discourse. Ultimately consequentialism, but a whole lot of deontology and virtue ethics in "real life".

Moral particularism

I don't know the definition of any of the "-ism"s. Should I not answer the questions? I imagine that others will be in the same position as I am.

If you can spare the time, then read pragmatists excellent summaries or click on the link of the term you don't understand in my glossary. Otherwise, only answer the ones you understand.

[EDIT: The way I had initially described the distinction was misleading, as pointed out by thomblake. I apologize for potentially skewing the results of the poll, although I don't think my revised version is that far off from the earlier version. Still, I should have been more careful.]

Moral realism: There are objective moral facts, i.e. there are facts about what is right and wrong (or good and bad) that are not constituted by a subject's beliefs and desires.

Moral anti-realism: The denial of moral realism.

My 'Other' answer is "Depends what you mean."

I've never seen a completely satisfying reduction of moral facts, and I don't know whether such a successful reduction would be a vindicative or an eliminative one. Am I a moral realist or an anti-realist?

Other: While there are objective "moral facts" this is because we are implying various subjective human values into the word 'moral.' Given the word 'moral' there are certain facts about what that behavior is like, but they are not "out there in the world" and are highly contextual.

Lean toward: moral realism. My leanings are semantic. There is not one unified object or semantic value that all members of our linguistic community intend by 'moral.' So we must either choose one of the semantic values in advance, or leave all moral statements underdetermined. I think choosing a semantic value that naturalizes morality (e.g., 'morality is behaving in accord with a decision procedure that optimizes for the overall preference satisfaction of all preference-bearers') is much more useful and conducive to our goals than choosing one that forfeits all moral convictions to the Dark Side. If we want to win, we have to convince people in general to move toward a LessWrongier perspective; and convincing people without making any appeal to words like 'good,' 'bad,' 'right,' 'wrong,' 'moral,' or 'immoral' is a hell of a handicap.

Other: There is only one right morality criteria, but it is not written into the fabric of the universe or anything. It is the idealized criteria that humans refer to as "right". It is not relative to belief or individual preferences.

What I care about (my utility function) includes this abstract morality, but also very relative things like "I like human females" and "I'm more important than you".

I'd say accept moral antirealism except that that is too easily construed as relativism or some other philosophy.

Other: I think I'm a realist, but it really depends on the definition of "desires."

For the record, I misread pragmatist's definition. My answer, which was Lean toward moral realism, should have been lean toward moral anti-realism. (I missed the "that are not agent-relative" part.)

I tend to view game strategies that lead to the best stable equilibrium as moral injunctions ( tit for tat, cooperate first) These are provable ( under certain assumptions) so I lean towards saying they are "real"

You can filter the survey results by specialization. Use the AOS (Area of Specialization) drop down menu.

All I can say is that you're not going to be happy with the 'philosophy of religion' statistics.

Yes, but then how would you handle the "Other" options?

Scientific anti-realism: While there may be strong reasons to believe in the empirical predictions of our best scientific theories, there are no strong reasons to believe in their theoretical claims about unobservable entities (such as quarks).

Scientific realism: There are strong reasons to believe in the theoretical claims about unobservable entities made by our best scientific theories.

Other: the distinction between scientific realism and anti-realism is mostly meaningless. If a scientific theory makes claims about "unobservable entities" (not sure what exactly it means), either these claims are logically entangled with testable claims that have been experimentally verified and then the reasons to believe in them are as good as the reasons to believe the verified claims (supposedly about "observable objects") or these claims are independent of the rest of the theory and presumably untestable, which means that the theory is un-Occamian and shouldn't be considered good scientific theory.

Voted lean toward Scientific Realism, but possibly confused.

There's no difference between "observed" and "inferred". Also, some parts of our models "exist" others are just parts of models.

Note: I don't think most theistic philosophers would consider the simulation hypothesis to be a variant of theism.

I just hit "Accept: Theism" by accident. Yes, accident, not divine providence, thank you very much. Is there a way to revote?

I think it is not obviously wrong that we live in some slices of "all possible worlds", and within all possible worlds there are beings with fancy super powers or perfect moral authority. At the same time I recognize that the religious awe and devotion I have felt at times are quirks of my brain and not a result of causal interaction with those possible-world-thingies. But I'm not sure whether or not to label those thingies as gods / deities, in addition to calling them weird aliens to whom religion has no access. Finding out whether some of those thingies are simulating me wouldn't have any influence on my choice of label.

Humeanism: The laws of nature are compressed descriptions of salient patterns in the distribution of physical events.

Non-Humeanism: The laws of nature are not mere descriptions. They determine the distribution of physical events.

Other: What's the difference?

Other: there are high-level laws of nature that are compressed descriptions, and low-level laws of nature that determine events.

"Lean toward: non-Humeanism", because given that we are in a simulation, it should be possible to recover "laws" that are isomorphic to constants in the source code via reverse engineering (natural science). Whether Humeanism holds outside of our own "world" seems like a separate question.

Other: Both. Our laws are compressions of the distribution of physical events. There is some underlying rule set that determines the distribution of physical events.

If I believe that the reason we get nicely compressed descriptions of salient patterns, because the mathematical abstractions have concrete realizations in the symmetries at the basis of physics, is that Non-Humeanism?

And if I further hold the propositional belief that using the words "The laws of nature are not mere descriptions." is likely to make me too attached to current beliefs about physics (or more likely evolutionary psych) and the belief that one can never have perfect knowledge, so any conception of natural laws I (or anyone) will ever have will be Humean, should I have hit "other"?

B-theory: Specifying the temporal ordering of all events in space-time exhausts all the objective temporal facts about those events.

A-theory: Specifying the temporal ordering of all events in space-time does not exhaust all the objective temporal facts about them. There is a further temporal fact about a given event: whether it is in the past, in the present or in the future. These are objective facts that are not fixed by merely specifying which events happen earlier or later.

Lean toward B-theory if pushed to answer, but I wonder what cognitive algorithm even generated this as a possibly interesting question.

Also, who the hell has invented the names for that?

"Other": The nature of physics has a strong possibility of being such that the question makes no sense.

Sort of lean toward B-theory, but I suspect other temporal facts may exist. However, they are not of the form "X is in the present/future/past." Also, the nature of time may make these the wrong questions to ask as noted below.

Other: Events might not be ordered, yet time exists. This would be the case with the Timeless Barbourian Physics Yudkowsky discusses in the sequences.

Also could be the case if some variety of many worlds of quantum style, or all possible worlds of Lewis style is the case.

The Anthopic folk, like me, Katja, Bostrom and several others, might also amuse themselves by inquiring: Could in one of the many infinite universe (or Big universe) theories be the case that all time-like facts are some form of indexical fact?

Other. I think the most fundamental aspect of time is local quantum instability, rather than relationships such as "earlier than/later than" or "past-present-future" between events.

Other: I don't know.

Poll: Should these polls have an "I don't know" / neutral option? [pollid:95]

Note: I haven't included "I don't know" on this poll because its purpose is to get the balance of opinion for/against. The other polls in the comments on this article are intended to get an overall picture of the local population, so it would be interesting if a question had a high percentage of "I don't know" responses.

I'm amazed that these philosophy types get paid to to write about and teach what is essentially a trivial point in math, affine spaces (removing absolute point of origin), no pun intended.. How annoying.

Disjunctivism: In normal cases, when a person is perceiving something, the object of their perception is a mind-independent object. The character of the person's phenomenal experience is explained by the properties of the object (for instance, a person perceiving an apple has an experience of redness because the object of their perception -- the apple -- is red). However, when a person is hallucinating or experiencing an illusion, the object of their perception is some sort of mind-dependent entity (perhaps sense-data; see below). So hallucination and veridical perception are substantially different kinds of mental processes.

Representationalism: Perceptual experience is representational. It represents our immediate environment as being a certain way. Since representations can be both accurate and inaccurate, we can understand both veridical perception and hallucination as the same kind of process. The difference is merely in the success of the representation. To be perceiving is to be representing one's immediate environment in certain ways (visually, aurally, etc.), and perception is accurate to the extent that this representation corresponds to reality.

Sense-datum theory: The objects of our perception are not mind-independent entities, they are mind-dependent objects called sense-data. These are objects like "a red spot at such-and-such position in my visual field". We infer the existence of mind-independent objects from patterns in the sense-data we perceive.

Qualia theory: [I don't think I fully understand the claims of qualia theory. I have tried to describe the kinds of things qualia theorists say, but if it appears confused that's because I am confused.] The phenomenal character of our perceptual experience (the particular way our experience feels) is non-representational. We don't infer information about the external world from the particular feel of our conscious experience; rather, our conscious experience is simply what it feels like (from the inside) to be obtaining sensory information about our environment. One way to put is that my conscious experience doesn't tell me that the apple I'm perceiving is red. My conscious experience is just an effect of the particular way in which I am obtaining information about the apple; I am perceiving the apple red-ly.

Other: all of these seem like plausible models with a nonzero amount of predictive power. I don't see how the truth of one of these implies that the others are false. Representationalism and sense-datum theory seem the most useful, I guess, but my real answer is "I don't know, ask a neurologist."

Other: These are all true for different meanings of "the object of one's perception".

Ill-formed question. See my other comment.

Externalism: It is possible for a person to sincerely hold a moral belief (or make a moral judgment) without feeling any motivation to adhere to that belief/judgment. The claim is not just that the motivation might be trumped by other motivations, it is that it is possible for there to be no motivation at all.

Internalism: It is impossible to sincerely make a moral judgment without being motivated to act in accordance with it, although it may be the case that the motivation is trumped by other countervailing motivations.

Other: This is a not-very-interesting definitional question as to exactly which kind of mental states should be counted as "sincerely making a moral judgement".

Don't psychopaths count as evidence for "externalism"? (They know what they're doing is wrong but don't care.)

I accept externalism on the part of some possible sentient creatures, but I think this question with respect to humans is a question of definitions, and even if you decide on a definition it becomes an empirical question I don't know the answer to.

Other: I was unable to resolve my thoughts on this at all, and am not sure to what degree hearing more arguments either way would help that.

Is there somewhere a glossary for all the questions? That would be very helpful (beyond this survey).

pragmatist has added comments with descriptions of the key terms to most of the poll question comments.

Also - there was already a similar thread...

Interesting; perhaps someone would be willing to check them against this newer data for changes in Less Wrongers' beliefs over time.

A zombie is physically identical to a human being but does not possess phenomenal experience. There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.

Inconceivable: We cannot fully conceive of a zombie. If you think you have a coherent conception of a zombie, it is because you haven't thought about your conception carefully enough. Sufficient thought will reveal that your conception is incoherent.

Conceivable but not metaphysically possible: One can arrive at a coherent conception of zombies, but objects that match this conception cannot possibly exist, not even in worlds with different laws of nature than ours.

Metaphysically possible: The existence of zombies is possible.

Went for "metaphysically possible". I think zombies exist, and we are they.

Other: I wouldn't say it's inconceivable exactly, but I think the thought experiment, in framing the possibility of a decoupling of phenomenal experience from cognitive architecture, primes for some intuitions that don't make a lot of sense to me.

Went for "conceivable but not metaphysically possible".

It seems pretty clear to me that we can and do "conceive" of zombies, or of other puzzles like inverted spectra (you see red while I see green, but we're both looking at the same tree, and both call the tree "green"). However, this is because of a mental trick in the way we conceive mental states.

Basically, for normally-sighted people, it seems that when we imagine a physical object (like a tree), we imagine it from an external perspective. We induce in ourselves a mental state similar to the one we would get from looking at the object concerned (the tree). However, when we imagine a mental state itself (such as an experience of green), we do so sympathetically, or from an internal perspective, by inducing in ourselves the same or a similar mental state.

So this allows us to "mix and match" brain states and mental states. For instance, I can imagine your brain while you are looking at a tree (I have a mental picture of grey matter with lots of neurons firing) while at the same time imagining the mental state of experiencing red. No problem at all... it seems perfectly conceivable that these could happen together; instant inverted spectrum. Or I can imagine the same brain state (same grey matter, same firings) while not imagining a mental state at all (it's all neurons firing in complicated chains, but no-one's at home)... again seems perfectly conceivable that these could happen together; instant p-zombie.

But it's all just a dumb quirk of imagination. Because of the different imaginative techniques, we fool ourselves into conceiving apparent possibilities that aren't really possible after all. One way to debug the imagination is to ask ourselves this: "Suppose I were forced to imagine a mental state from the external perspective, the same way I imagine a tree. What would that look like?" And the short answer is "Well, without scientific evidence, I really don't have a clue. I have no intuition whatseover about what a mental state really looks like from the outside. Up to now, I've always imagined one from the inside. From the outside perspective, it might just as well be a brain state as a soul state or an ectoplasm state. So I'd best follow the science wherever it's pointing".

Correspondence: A proposition is true if and only if it bears some sort of congruence relation to a state of affairs that obtains. When I say that "P is true", where P is some proposition, I am saying that P stands in this relation to some portion of reality.

Deflationary: Ascribing truth to a proposition amounts to no more than asserting the proposition. It does not mean you are attributing some further property to the proposition (such as congruence with some state of affairs). Saying "P is true" is the same as just saying "P'.

Epistemic: To say that a proposition is true is just to say that it meets a high standard of epistemic warrant, and that we are thereby justified in asserting it. The search for truth and the search for justification are not separate goals. There is no more to truth than sufficiently powerful justification.

I think there might be a difference here between truth of a proposition and truth of a sentence.

Ascribing truth to a proposition looks the same as just asserting the proposition (deflationary account).

Ascribing truth to a sentence looks like a combination of mapping it onto a proposition (interpreting the sentence) and then asserting that proposition.

Since I would regard propositions and states of affairs as either the same, or isomorphic, this looks like the correspondence theory of truth for sentences.

Non-skeptical realism: A mind-independent reality exists, and we have epistemic access to its structure. We can acquire substantial knowledge about reality.

Skepticism: A mind-independent reality exists, but we lack epistemic access to it. We cannot know the nature of reality. We only have access to how things appear to us, and we should take seriously the possibility that this is very different from how things actually are.

Idealism: Reality is not mind-independent. It is either wholly or partly mentally constituted. We can know about reality because there is not much (or no) distance between how things appear to us and how things actually are.

Trolley problem: There is a trolley traveling along a set of tracks. The driver has lost control of the trolley. On the track ahead of the trolley are five people who cannot get off the track in time and will all die if the trolley gets to them. You are standing next to a lever that can switch the track the trolley will take, preventing the deaths of the five people. On the other track is a single person who also cannot get away in time and so will die if you switch the track. Do you refrain from switching the track ("straight") or do you switch the track ("turn")?

Presuming I value the lives of all the people involved equally, I turn on to the side track. If I have a strong reason not to let the person on the side track die - they're a relative, I know them well, they owe me money, I'm in love with them, whatever - I let it go straight.

This is a really easy problem if you accept that you're only a marginally good person at best.

Oops, I meant to choose "Accept: turn" instead of "Accept: straight"

Is this about what I think would be normatively better to do or about what I predict I would actually do if personally faced with such a situation?

I voted "lead toward: straight", but thinking about it some more I think the correct answer is: "other, hypothetical isn't sufficiently detailed to determine correct choice".

Me: I didn't mean to two-box!

Omega: Why would you share an excuse with an omniscient agent?

Me: Because even if there is no causal connection between me giving an excuse, and me being excused, there may be a logical connection. Also, why would an omniscient agent ask a question?

Omega: Due to meta-level concerns. Obviously.

An abstract object is an object that does not correspond to any pattern of matter and energy in space-time. Purported examples of abstract objects are numbers, properties, sets, etc. An object that does correspond to some concentration of matter/energy in space-time is called a concrete object.

Nominalism: Abstract objects do not exist.

Platonism: Abstract objects exist.

Other: I hold a Tegmark-style "all mathematical objects exist" view, but additionally hold that this requires promoting the type of the "exists" property from boolean-valued to real-valued, so that this becomes "all mathematical objects have nonzero degree of existence", and most ordinary usages of the word "exists" pick up an implied "as a substructure of" relation to some set of universes. This "as a substructure of" relation excludes platonic objects when present, so nominalism vs. platonism reduces to the word "exists" being a pair of homonyms.

I think there's some truth in the claim that this is just a debate over the word "exists" but actually, in philosophy there's a fairly well-regarded meaning of the word and the debate tends to be about this meaning. I think that's one of the reasons comparisons of people from LW with philosophers will be misleading, philosophers use a lot of technical vocabulary that differs from the standard usage.

So by "exists" philosophers tend to mean something like "is quantified over in our fundamental theory of the universe". So nominalists in mathematics tend to be arguing something like (and this is a dangerously rough approximate), "we can describe the universe without referring to numbers etc". See Hartry Field for an example.

This is rough but actually, platonism begins to seem a lot more plausible when it's understood in the way that philosophers actually use it. I suspect, then, that those from LW and philosophers are just answering different questions here.

I think I'm more comfortable with the negation of Platonism than with the positive claim of nominalism, but I suppose in this context we have 'nominalism' = '~Platonism'.

Whether what is usually meant by 'nominalism' is the same is as unclear to me as I am uncomfortable with the idea of making a positive claim about it.

Other: Existence is a two-valued function, not one-valued.

Other: Abstract objects clearly have some kind of logical existence, but it is very different from concrete existence. Also, I'm confused on this one. Also, the answer doesn't matter, so who cares.

Basically Taboo exists

Tree-in-a-forest. I think that "exist" can have (at least) two different meanings and that abstract objects exist in one of those sense but not in the other.

Other: utilitarianism

Other: I think it's a false dichotomy. I think that an ideal system of government will probably sometimes have to sacrifice libertarian principles in favor of egalitarian ones, and sometimes have to sacrifice egalitarian principles in favor of libertarian ones.

My real answer is "somewhere in between," but I think that pretty much describes everyone. I ended up answering in terms of current political structures and what direction I think they should move in.

What if I simply don't know?

I voted 'other' and downvoted the question. Lordy, what the heck are you doin' bringing this in here? D:

Other: solve scarcity, let everyone have infinite everything.

If libertarian vs. egalitarian is the main axis along which members of a group differ politically, it's a very unusual group.

What are we really trying to find out about the group? Possibilities that come to mind include:

• The philosophical viewpoints that underlie our political views
• Our political preferences along various axes, such as interventionist vs. non-interventionist economic, social and foreign policy
• Party preferences

That's the American sense of "libertarianism", right? I take this question to be about the horizontal axis of The Political Compass.

Other: Do the right thing. Consequentialism and all that.

Would gladly bow completely to an FAI, but value freedom. Would accept some people doing better than others, but it would suck if the have-nots can't do anything about it.

What a simplistic dichotomy...

Other: "Justification" is just another complicated pre-Bayes way of trying to understand what belief is.

Externalism: A subject's belief can be justified even if the justification is not consciously available to the subject. For instance, if the belief is formed on the basis of a reliable perceptual faculty, it may be a justified belief even if the subject is not aware that the relevant faculty is reliable or even that the relevant faculty is the source of the belief.

Internalism: A subject's beliefs are justified only if the subject has conscious access to the justification.

Voted for "externalism", but caring about whether a belief is "justified" is probably a mistake.

Other: whatever. The correct answer is Bayes, and the engineering approach. Let the philosophers fight over which of these that is.

Other:

I dithered on this a lot.

I sympathize with the meta-answer (as above) of discarding the notion of a "justified belief" in favor of talking about how experiences serve as evidence for beliefs, but it's not clear to me that that precludes engaging with the question at its own level. Yes, whether a belief is "justified" can be expressed more precisely in terms of confidence intervals based on available evidence, but I'm not convinced that it needs to be.

I end up saying it depends.

I would say I'm justified in believing the two objects I'm looking at are the same size if they look the same size to me, even if I'm not consciously aware of the process whereby I arrive at that belief, even in cases where it turns out that they aren't the same size after all. Which is an externalist position as described here.

But I would not say I'm justified in believing any proposition I happen to believe. In some cases I would declare a belief unjustified if I'm not aware of the mechanism whereby I arrive at it. So I'm not comfortable describing myself as an externalist in a broader sense, or even as leaning towards externalism in a broader sense.

Thinking about it some more, I suppose this dichotomy dissolves if I'm willing to treat sufficiently vague patterns as a "relevant faculty". "I believe the objects are the same size because that's what my eyes report and my eyes have a good track record about that sort of thing" might qualify as having conscious access to justification, in which case I suppose I'm an internalist... I can't imagine a belief I would call justified for which there isn't some kind of explanation of that sort, however vague, that I can make. But this seems uninteresting.

Yes: There are certain sentences which are true solely by virtue of the meanings of the words involved, so these sentences are not subject to empirical falsification. Example: "All bachelors are unmarried." It is impossible for this sentence to be false, provided the words retain their ordinary meaning.

No: Every sentence is potentially open to empirical falsification. [EDIT: I guess the "No" answer would also be appropriate for those who believe that no sentence is open to empirical falsification, although I would be very surprised if anyone on this site fits that description.]

Other: Unique meanings are a useful approximation, but if you stretch an approximation thin enough it develops holes. For example, "bachelor" in middle english refers to a squire, and squires can be married.

I probably should have voted for "Other," but I voted for "Lean toward: yes" because I still outright agree in certain contexts.

Quine's Two Dogmas is certainly enough to make me doubt the usefulness of the analytic/synthetic distinction as regards ordinary language, but for formal languages, this is not the case. It's also not clear to me whether it's impossible to construct a language (for communication) clear enough to make sense of analytic/synthetic distinctions.

This is one of those wonderfully agnostic positions that philosophy often leaves me with.

Other: Lean toward two-dimensionalism.

This was the most surprising poll result, to me.

Other: I think the distinction clearly exists (in the sense that it's a human concept that carves reality more or less at the joints, so that a person can learn the definition and then come up with examples), but it's not useful for much apart from arguments-about-words-rather-than-things, and, because of the fuzziness of definitions, in practice it's more like a continuum than a strictly binary distinction.

Wow. I voted "No" because modus ponens and such are just procedures that produce evidence, not some kind of magical truth juice.

I guess if "Yes" means you can construct consistent definitions that are not empirically verifiable, then I'd vote Yes.

Crud. Misread the poll as about the viability of the a prior / a posteriori distinction. (True without empirical content {the usual example is first-order logic or mathematics} vs. truth-value only after empirical content).

History note: Kant wanted to assert the existence of a priori synthentic statements - a position I find nonsensical.

Externalism: The representational content of our mental states (e.g. what objects our beliefs are about) is dependent upon properties of our external environment, not just upon properties of our brain state.

Internalism: The representational content of our mental states is fixed by our brain state.

If you take Dennett's intentional stance towards our mental states, I think you can only do so by considering the external environment that the brain is operating in. Which I guess makes me an externalist (which is what I answered), but I'm not sure whether that's the traditional definition.

I voted "Lean toward: externalism", but the I get the feeling that even asking the question shows that you're barking up the wrong tree.

Other: What? I'm not understanding the question.

Other: embodied cognition (externalism but moreso).

Other: What? The brain state simply is. You can give it meaning, but meaning is a two place function. I'm probably confused.

Other: While the only things I can directly experience are my brain states, my senses allow me to have indirect content regarding my external environment. While every belief I have regarding external objects is about some brain state, I only have the representational content because it is important for me to match my mental state to the external-world. There is a relationship between the external-world state and the mental representation that cannot be ignored.

Physicalism: A physical duplicate of our world (i.e. a world in which all the same physical properties are instantiated at the same space-time locations) must necessarily also be a mental duplicate (i.e. all mental states instantiated in that world must be identical to the mental states instantiated in this one).

Anti-physicalism: The denial of physicalism.

Is this the same as asking whether there is a 1:1 correspondence between mind states and brain states?

"Other": I maintain a physicalist stance (à la van Fraassen), but do not affirm physicalism.

Oops I accidentally antiphysicalism. put me down for the correct answer (physicalism).

Teletransporter: You are placed in a machine that will instantaneously disintegrate your body, in the process recording its exact atomic configuration. This information is then beamed to another machine far away, and in that machine new matter is used to construct a body with the same configuration as yours. Would you consider yourself to have survived the process, and teleported from one machine to the other ("survival")? Or do you think you have died, and the duplicate in the far away machine is a different person ("death")?

Voted Lean: Death but want to change my answer to "have no bloody clue". For the record, when I first thought about this I was accept: death.

Contextualism: The truth of a knowledge claim depends on the context in which it is uttered. A claim such as "Alice knows that she is not in the Matrix" might be true in certain contexts (when explaining to someone in ordinary conversation why Alice didn't lose sleep over the movie Matrix) but false in other contexts (when uttered in an epistemology class in a discussion about the possibility of us being in the Matrix). The usual analysis is that the same sentence about knowledge expresses different propositions in different contexts (just like the sentence "It's raining here" expresses different propositions in different contexts).

Relativism: Whether a subject possesses knowledge of a certain proposition is relative to a set of epistemic standards. Relative to one such set, she might know that the proposition is true, while relative to another set, she does not qualify as knowing this. So, strictly speaking, "knowledge" is a three-place function, taking as arguments a subject, a proposition and a set of standards.

Invariantism: Knowledge claims are either true or false simpliciter. Their truth does not vary depending on context, and they are not relativized to epistemic standards.

EDIT: A couple of people have said that the difference between contextualism and relativism is unclear. I have tried to clarify in this comment.

None of the prior discussion reflects an understanding of 'contextualism' as standardly conceived by philosophers (if the Stanford Encyclopedia exposition is representative of philosophers' views). So I suspect the polling data for this question will need to be tossed out. Here's a clearer explanation of the difference between these doctrines:

contextualism = The semantic thesis that 'x knows y' may vary in truth-value depending on the social and psychological status of the knowledge-attributor. I.e., 'x knows y' often or always fails to have a determinate truth-value, unless it is clear from context that we are really saying 'x knows y relative to evaluator z,' where z is someone evaluating 'does x know y?' Thus, a better name for 'contextualism' would be 'attributor contextualism' (which it has indeed been called).

Note that contextualism does not imply that the distribution of knowledge in the world is arbitrary or just a matter of subjective opinion; there may be very strict constraints on what sorts of 'subjective opinions' held by an evaluator affect knowledge-relative-to-an-evaluator. For instance, it is plausible that 'I know I have hands' would count as true if the evaluator were your psychiatrist, but would count as false if the evaluator were someone with whom you were debating the Simulation Hypothesis. That's not because of the evaluator's mere opinions; it's because there are higher standards for knowledge in metaphysical debates than in everyday conversation. An evaluator with crazy, unrealistic standards wouldn't have his/her own, equally legitimate beliefs about what counts as knowledge; s/he would just be consistently in error.

Nor is contextualism a meta-semantic claim about how the word 'knowledge' varies across linguistic communities; rather, it is the semantic claim that 'knowledge' in all (standard-English-speaking) contexts would frequently be judged to vary based on the state of the evaluator. Contextualism could turn out to be false for purely empirical reasons, if, say, sociological data proved that we don't vary in knowledge-attribution based on the mental state and social context of the attributor.

relativism = The metaphysical thesis that knowledge as such is relative to a standard of assessment. Like contextualists, relativists think 'know' is three-place; but their relation is 'x knows y according to standard z,' not 'x knows y relative to evaluator z.' And whereas there are presumably facts about which agent is evaluating a knowledge-claim in the real world, there are no facts about which standard is the 'right' one; so there simply are no facts about knowledge, or even about knowledge-according-to-an-agent. What there are are facts about 'what certain standards treat as being "knowledge"'.

I said that relativism is a 'metaphysical' view, not a semantic one. This is important. Contextualism can be refuted if it turns out that the English language is invariantist; but relativism can't be so easily refuted, since their claim is not that we think of knowledge as relative, but that knowledge really is relative. Relativism is very close to radical skepticism, just with 'knowledge'-talk preserved as a way of signaling one's chosen standards. Whereas contextualism is just as opposed to skepticism as is invariantism. Speaking of which...

invariantism = The claim that we have knowledge of some things, combined with the semantic thesis that contextualism is false and the metaphysical thesis that relativism is false. According to an invariantist, 'I know I have hands' is either true or false simpliciter; evaluators and standards-of-evaluation might disagree about this statement's truth-value, but that's because some evaluators and some standards are wrong, not because 'knowledge' itself is unsaturated.

Source for all this: Rysiew, "Relativism and Contextualism".

Lean towards contextualism, but with some problems. For instance:

"I know that I have hands" "I don't know that I'm not a brain in a vat"

However, I've just asserted them side by side in the same context (of a Less Wrong discussion). And I don't think relativism helps much either: can the assessor change their epistemic standards so quickly in the space of two consecutive sentences??

This is one of those cases where I'm not sure exactly what "objective" and "subjective" are supposed to mean. Probably 2-place words, but probably objective ones.

I went with Other because I think aesthetic judgments are mostly the same for humans, but will be whatever evolution spits out for non-humans. There's some objective (aesthetic value is a product of evolution) and some subjective (because it's a product of evolution, it's environment-dependent and subject to variation).

For all I know, though, that position is Accept:subjective, since 2-place words would be a radical new insight to most philosophers who pick Accept:objective.

Of course this question is universally (snerk) misunderstood as "objective" = "universal", which are not actually synonymous.

Other: I'm genuinely undecided about this. I don't think I lean substantially in either direction.

Other: a complex weighted mixture of both, and varying according to context. Similar to ethical value.

I'm not sure how anyone could argue that aesthetic value is objective when humans regularly disagree about the aesthetic value of things. It's a pretty stern counterexample.

Other: I often find these sorts of questions useful as a way of clarifying my own understanding of related subjects, and I think clarifying understanding can lead to pragmatic value even in the absence of an agreed-upon answer.

That is, sometimes it is useful to go from "I am confused about X" to "there are three possibilities (X1, X2, X3) and I know what each one entails but I don't know how to choose among them", even though the question remains equally unanswered.

This is similar to your "interesting debate" option, I suppose, but different enough that I felt uncomfortable picking it.

Philosophical problems as a whole are a mix of all 3, and I don't know enough about modern philosophy to empirically determine which answer reigns in the "most." Voted "Other."

"Uninteresting", but perhaps only due to Sturgeon's law.

There probably is a gigantic bias to the "Uninteresting" amount of responders. If you find those uninteresting, you wouldn't get here in the first place. So, given now it is about 25% "Uninteresting" I'd guess more than 50% LWers are of that opinion.

Other: unanswered philosophical questions are about evenly distributed between interesting questions that will soon be matters of engineering, confused and revealing questions, and historical nonsense. I produced easy examples of all three categories without trying.

This book makes the argument that (paraphrased, and put into LW terms) most philosophy is uninteresting because their curiosity doesn't seek to annihilate itself. Instead of asking "how can we actually improve our knowledge?" they bicker over the definition of JTB.

The tools and insights of philosophy can be useful when you try to answer the practical questions, but most controversial topics are controversial because there are a lot of wrong ideas there, not because it's a hot new empirical question (Higgs: does it exist? If so, how big is it?).

Uninteresting artifacts of history. But some (moral realism or not) are vitally important to figuring out effective social engineering.

But I'm in a minority in this community in thinking that social engineering is desirable (other than as an inevitable effect of physical engineering/ technological progress).

ADBOC with talking about "most," so I voted other. But maybe I should have voted "Uninteresting."

I voted for "Interesting questions", because a slight majority of the polled questions fall in that category to me, and that matches the literal meaning of "most". But when 30-40% of the key questions of a discipline look "Uninteristing", it is not a great endorsement for it.

Other: Philosophical problems primarily serve to encourage creative thinking and asking more abstract questions about the world. Philosophical debates primarily serve to remind us that intelligent, well-meaning people can disagree about pretty fundamental things, so we should tread carefully when assuming our "opponents" are idiots or monsters.

This depends a great deal on both which branch of philosophy we're talking about & who is evaluating that particular branch's usefulness.

For example, I find developments in logics, philosophy of science, & general epistemology to be of great interest, and I perceive all three topics to be advancing (listed in order of priority as that goes) as the years go by. I'm sure others feel differently.

It would be hard to get past the fact that, especially between the different branches of philosophy, there is a great deal of "philosophy of language" that is or must be done just to get at what anyone's talking about. But that is, to some extent, true of any field with a technical language.

So I guess all four answers make sense in some sense.

Russellianism: The meanings of our (referential) words are the objects to which they refer. When I say "Socrates is mortal", the meaning of the word `Socrates' in that sentence is a particular person who lived in ancient Greece.

Fregeanism: The meanings of our words are not directly objects in the world but the particular way we conceive of those objects. Two words referring to the same object can have different meaning since they correspond to different ways of conceiving the object. For instance, "morning star" and "evening star" both refer to to the same object (Venus), but they have different meanings.

Other: Seems like a semantic problem about the word "meaning".

Both Russellianism and Fregeanism make assumptions about the way language is related to the world that I reject.

I'm not sure I entirely understand the question. Isn't it just the distinction between connotation and denotation?

Other: Yes.

What exactly do they mean by "meanings"? Do they mean "mental state triggered by the word" or "what the word is referencing"? Because it could go either way, depending on which definition of "meaning" we're using.

Voted Other. I would say the meanings of our words are the desired state changes in the world correlated with the use of those words. I don't know if that position has a name.

It seems to me that we can mean things in both ways once we are aware of the distinction.

Other: Fregean thing seems right, but talking about the "meaning" of words is stupid. Words are symbols that cause the reader/listener to construct certain thoughts. Useful for communication, I hear.

Other: some words are Fregeanian others are Russellian.

This is the same distinction as Russellianism vs. Fregeanism, except applied specifically to proper names. I think in the Philpapers survey, this question replaced the Russellianism vs. Fregeanism one.

Fregean: The meaning of a proper name is a way of conceiving of its bearer. Different names for the same bearer may be associated with different ways of conceiving, and thus have different meanings. For instance, "Superman" and "Clark Kent" have different meanings.

Millian: The meaning of a proper name is its bearer. The meanings of "Superman" and "Clark Kent" are identical.

Other: both can be true depending on the situation. This can be only meaningfully interpreted as a question of psychology (what goes on in people's heads), there's no way in which one method of ascribing meaning to names is 'truer' than the other so asking to choose between the two looks like a confused question.

Classical: The standard kinds of logic that you learn in undergraduate logic classes are the best (or right) logics, the ones that best model (ETA: idealized versions of) our inferential processes. Examples of classical logics are Boolean logic and first-order predicate calculus. Classical logics are bivalent (sentences can only be true or false), obey the principle of the excluded middle (if a proposition is not true, its negation must be true) and obey the law of non-contradiction (a proposition and its negation cannot both be true).

Non-classical: The best logic is not classical. Non-classical logics usually reject the principle of the excluded middle or the law of non-contradiction. An example of a non-classical logic is dialetheism, according to which there are true contradictions (i.e. some sentences of the form "A and not A" are true). Proponents of non-classical logics argue that many of our scientific theories, if you probe deeply, involve inconsistencies, yet we don't regard them as trivially false. So they claim that we need to revise the way we understand logic to accurately model our inferential processes.

Other: Different logics are appropriate for modeling how one should infer in different domains. Classical logics are fine for many applications but it is possible (maybe even plausible) that non-classical logics will be better models for certain applications. For instance, fuzzy logic (a many-valued logic) has been successfully employed to control subway systems and build thermostats.

My interpretation of this question is metaphysical: 'Is reality classical?' This is shorthand for: 'Is there any fact that is fundamentally, objectively, and in principle...

... inexpressible? ... vague? ... contradictory? ... indeterminate? (I.e., neither the case nor not-the-case.) ... etc.

But this is a strange set of questions, and I suspect most professional philosophers and LessWrongers are instead answering a confused mixture of (mostly trivial) questions like 'which logic do I find most useful?'.

Other: The objection to classical logic stated in pragmatist's summary needs to be addressed, but I lack sufficient knowledge of the field to determine whether the best resolution of these objections is likely to take the form of (a) a solution within classical logic or (b) the adoption of a non-classical logic.

Other: probability distributions over world-histories. Otherwise classical.

Yes: There are certain facts we can come to know for which our knowledge need not be based on sensory experience.

No: The sort of justification that elevates belief to knowledge must always appeal to sensory experience.

A priori knowledge is knowledge from the operation of a mind. It is a sort of sensory experience.

What, precisely, is the distinction between this and the "Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?" question?

Hasn't this one been resolved by computer science?

That would be too cumbersome to use for the commenters.

Physical view: The maintenance of personal identity requires bodily continuity. So, for instance, one cannot preserve a person by downloading their psychological state into a computer.

Psychological view: The maintenance of personal identity requires continuity of psychological states. As long as there is a continuing stream of psychological states with the appropriate causal relations between them, the person persists.

Other: Leaning toward a causal view. In other words, your past self has to be the cause of your future self, but the specific atoms are irrelevant.

I answered "lean toward psychological view", as I'm about evenly split between the psychological view and just considering the whole concept of personal identity incoherent/a wrong question in the first place.

Other: I suspect the answer to this question depends on the particular question you're asking. Often, I think, this is a values question - e.g. in what form do I want to continue existing?

Other: I think that personal identity is in a certain sort of brain process, rather than a static "brain state." (so, no "static minds") The physical view implies that personal identity can be reduced to certain brain states, and I reject that: a valid sort of active processing is important.

Physical view/other (?). I consider personal identity to be based only on the memory of past self, not actual brain process or existence of memory independent conscious mind. It may be very well that the experience of personal continuity is only an illusion as there is no actual continuity at all, only the recollection of previous events (including the attempts of introspection). An exact copy of me wouldn't be any different than myself.

Other: For everyone else that I observe, an exact atom-for-atom duplicate is the same person as the original. If a copy of me were made, my 'mind' would reside in the original.

I accept that my duplicate would claim to be the original, of course.

Other: Psychological states include some bodily states like sensory input, and possibly as much as "social contact." There is no firm boundary between physical and psychological. Uploads are possible, but will require emulation of more than just a brain. An atom-by-atom instantiation of the same mind (including enough of the body and environment) will be the same person.

Psychological view: This question is standing in for a particular question of values. Otherwise it's meaningless.

What is the psychological view, if it's non-physical(ist)?

I was going to post a snarky comment to the effect that if you discard outright religious views and cognition motivated by them, there doesn't seem to be much left to non-naturalism. But the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says it better:

There may be as much philosophical controversy about how to distinguish naturalism from non-naturalism as there is about which view is correct.

So non-naturalism looks like mostly a combination of religion and arguments over the meaning of the word "natural". As in, if we found evidence that spirits of the dead affected physical events, that would promote them to the status of natural physical phenomena. So of course everything that exists is "natural" - according to some definitions of the word.

What is there to non-naturalism that is worth the time of seriously investigating it?

What is a naturalism?

Other: Naturalism is the appropriate stance to take with respect to our own world, but our own world is (probably) not all there is. If the simulator were to intervene, then these interventions could reasonably be described as being supernatural. Does this view have a name already? If not, I nominate relativistic naturalism.

Empiricism: Our only source of novel information about the world is sensory experience.

Rationalism: There is some information about the world that we can arrive at by rational cogitation, without having to rely on sensory experience.