TPF Survey

[Delete] @Baden

Cool. I had to eyeball a few questions based on summaries because I haven't really given a few subjects much thought before.

I picked "Other" for "External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?". I side with internal realism/transcendental idealism.

Reply to Michael I'm pretty much a Kantian, so that one was easy. ;-)

EDIT: interestingly enough you didn't opt for a correspondence theory of truth.

Quoting Benkei

I'm pretty much a Kantian, so that one was easy.

You picked idealism? I don't think of Kant's transcendental idealism as idealism, just as I don't think of Putnam's internal realism as realism. Despite their names, I think they're very similar (if not outright the same), and neither properly counts as either realism or idealism (as traditionally understood), hence why I chose "Other".

interestingly enough you didn't opt for a correspondence theory of truth.

I'm partial to Dummett's account of truth, which I think works best with Wittgenstein's account of meaning. If we want to know what it means to be true then we have to look to how we use the word "true", and its use is tied to something like verification procedures, so an epistemic theory of truth.

Quoting Michael

You picked idealism? I don't think of Kant's transcendental idealism as idealism, just as I don't think of Putnam's internal realism as realism. Despite their names, I think they're very similar (if not outright the same), and neither properly counts as either realism or idealism (as traditionally understood), hence why I chose "Other".

Strictly you're correct, Kant (in his own terms) was of course an empirical realist and transcendental idealist. I opted for idealism because of Kant's position on correspondence theory of truth and knowledge. So transcendental idealism is a requirement in his view (which I share), the empirical realism less so. As Morrandir once explained it:

As a sidenote, for Kant a theory of knowledge is indeed possible (or so he thinks) and in fact he would claim that only for a transcendental idealist can this be possible. The reason for this might be constructed as follows. Truth is to be understood as correspondence between our judgments and reality. If reality is taken to be transcendentally real, then the correspondence is between our judgments and a reality wholly independent and unreachable for us. I cannot know whether my judgment "I have a blue shirt on" is true or false since this refers to some reality that is by definition inaccessible to us: we are doomed to mere beliefs and can have no knowledge. But if reality is taken to be transcendentally ideal, then the correspondence is between my judgments and the (REAL!) objects that present themselves in my experience. Then this correspondence can be established, and we can have knowledge. Of course, a hardcore proponent of correspondence theory could not accept Kant's formulation of it, since it is more properly thought as a sort of coherence theory instead of a proper correspondence theory.

It's not that I sit on the fence about all these ismic controversies, so much as I find myself firmly on both sides; 'other' suggests something not either, rather than both, but it is the nearest I can get to not misleading. Sometimes, though I had to more or less invent a position not to seem entirely contrarian.

[Delete] @Baden

Reply to René Descartes I marked theism but had in mind "lean toward," as I do lean more toward it than atheism.

The number of alleged virtue ethicists so far is somewhat surprising. I put that, but only because I don't know what else to call Schopenhauer's ethics.

[Delete] @Baden

Reply to Thorongil Yeah, I was also surprised at how many virtue ethicists there are on here. Also nominalists.

I wonder if any of the other Others in Perceptual Experience clicked that because, like me, they didn't know what any of the named terms meant.

Reply to andrewk

*Raises hand* had to do a google search.

Also, for all of the "surprised at" posts...we're at 19 votes so far...I guess that's pretty good, but still a fraction of the forum populous...

I'm surprised about the number of compatibilists. I guess the hard determinists and libertarians are just more vocal.

[Delete] @Baden