{"id":11129,"date":"2013-04-29T08:19:56","date_gmt":"2013-04-29T15:19:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=11129"},"modified":"2013-04-29T20:43:27","modified_gmt":"2013-04-30T03:43:27","slug":"what-do-philosophers-believe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/29\/what-do-philosophers-believe\/","title":{"rendered":"What Do Philosophers Believe?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Academics of all stripes enjoy conducting informal polls<\/a> of their peers to gauge the popularity of different stances on controversial issues. But the philosophers — and in particular, David Bourget & David Chalmers — have decided to be more systematic about it<\/a>. (Maybe they have more controversial issues to discuss?)<\/p>\n

They targeted 1,972 philosophy faculty members at 99 different institutions, and received results from 931 of them. Most of the universities were in English-speaking countries, and the others were chosen for strength in analytic philosophy, so the survey has an acknowledged bias toward analytic\/Anglocentric philosophy. They asked for simple forced-response answers (no essay questions!) concerning 30 different topics, from belief in God to normative ethics to the nature of time. The answers are pretty intriguing.<\/p>\n

Results below the fold. Note that atheism easily trumps theism, and compatibilism<\/a> is the leading approach to free will (although not by a huge amount). Only about half of the recipients identify as naturalists, which is smaller than I would have thought (and smaller than the percentage of “physicalists” when it comes to the mind, which is surprising to me). When they dig into details, there is a strong correlation between theism and whether a person specializes in philosophy of religion, predictably enough. Among philosophers who don’t specifically specialize in religion, the percentage of atheists is pretty overwhelming.
\n <\/p>\n

1. A priori knowledge:<\/strong> yes 71.1%; no 18.4%; other 10.5%.
\n2. Abstract objects:<\/strong> Platonism 39.3%; nominalism 37.7%; other 23.0%.
\n3. Aesthetic value:<\/strong> objective 41.0%; subjective 34.5%; other 24.5%.
\n4. Analytic-synthetic distinction:<\/strong> yes 64.9%; no 27.1%; other 8.1%.
\n5. Epistemic justi\ufb01cation:<\/strong> externalism 42.7%; internalism 26.4%; other 30.8%.
\n6. External world:<\/strong> non-skeptical realism 81.6%; skepticism 4.8%; idealism 4.3%; other 9.2%.
\n7. Free will:<\/strong> compatibilism 59.1%; libertarianism 13.7%; no free will 12.2%; other 14.9%.
\n8. God:<\/strong> atheism 72.8%; theism 14.6%; other 12.6%.
\n9. Knowledge claims:<\/strong> contextualism 40.1%; invariantism 31.1%; relativism 2.9%; other 25.9%.
\n10. Knowledge:<\/strong> empiricism 35.0%; rationalism 27.8%; other 37.2%.
\n11. Laws of nature:<\/strong> non-Humean 57.1%; Humean 24.7%; other 18.2%.
\n12. Logic:<\/strong> classical 51.6%; non-classical 15.4%; other 33.1%.
\n13. Mental content:<\/strong> externalism 51.1%; internalism 20.0%; other 28.9%.
\n14. Meta-ethics:<\/strong> moral realism 56.4%; moral anti-realism 27.7%; other 15.9%.
\n15. Metaphilosophy:<\/strong> naturalism 49.8%; non-naturalism 25.9%; other 24.3%.
\n16. Mind:<\/strong> physicalism 56.5%; non-physicalism 27.1%; other 16.4%.
\n17. Moral judgment:<\/strong> cognitivism 65.7%; non-cognitivism 17.0%; other 17.3%.
\n18. Moral motivation:<\/strong> internalism 34.9%; externalism 29.8%; other 35.3%.
\n19. Newcomb\u2019s problem:<\/strong> two boxes 31.4%; one box 21.3%; other 47.4%.
\n20. Normative ethics:<\/strong> deontology 25.9%; consequentialism 23.6%; virtue ethics 18.2%; other 32.3%.
\n21. Perceptual experience:<\/strong> representationalism 31.5%; qualia theory 12.2%; disjunctivism 11.0%; sense-datum theory 3.1%; other 42.2%.
\n22. Personal identity:<\/strong> psychological view 33.6%; biological view 16.9%; further-fact view 12.2%; other 37.3%.
\n23. Politics:<\/strong> egalitarianism 34.8%; communitarianism 14.3%; libertarianism 9.9%; other 41.0%.
\n24. Proper names:<\/strong> Millian 34.5%; Fregean 28.7%; other 36.8%.
\n25. Science:<\/strong> scienti\ufb01c realism 75.1%; scienti\ufb01c anti-realism 11.6%; other 13.3%.
\n26. Teletransporter:<\/strong> survival 36.2%; death 31.1%; other 32.7%.
\n27. Time:<\/strong> B-theory 26.3%; A-theory 15.5%; other 58.2%.
\n28. Trolley problem:<\/strong> switch 68.2%; don\u2019t switch 7.6%; other 24.2%.
\n29. Truth:<\/strong> correspondence 50.8%; de\ufb02ationary 24.8%; epistemic 6.9%; other 17.5%.
\n30. Zombies:<\/strong> conceivable but not metaphysically possible 35.6%; metaphysically possible 23.3%; inconceivable 16.0%; other 25.1%.<\/p>\n

Yes, some of the descriptions might not mean that much at first glance. Google<\/a> is your friend!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Academics of all stripes enjoy conducting informal polls of their peers to gauge the popularity of different stances on controversial issues. But the philosophers — and in particular, David Bourget & David Chalmers — have decided to be more systematic about it. (Maybe they have more controversial issues to discuss?) They targeted 1,972 philosophy faculty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11129"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11143,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11129\/revisions\/11143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}