How agnostic are you willing to be in philosophy?

Should finding out that other people disagree about something with you lead you to be agnostic about it, or at least moderate your views? I tend to think “yes,” but Peter van Inwagen has pointed out one difficulty for this view, especially for philosophy people like me: an awful lot of our beliefs are subjects of widespread disagreement, and this is especially true in philosophy.

Now, even before reading about this debate, I had developed a sense that I really don’t know what to say about an awful lot of philosophical issues. So, since discovering it, I’ve developed a fairly strong sense of myself as someone who is more willing than most people in philosophy to be agnostic about philosophical questions. I’ve always had a couple views I’ve held onto in spite of knowing that they’re controversial, but they’re the exception to my usual rule.

Then I found out about the PhilPapers Online Philosophy Survey, which seems like a nice test for this view. I went through the survey and tallied up my answers, how many times I picked each kind of answer. Out of the thirty questions, I used a straightforward “Accept [position X]” six times, “Lean toward [position X]” seven times, “Agnostic/undecided” eight times, “The question is too unclear to answer” three times, “There is no fact of the matter” twice, “Insufficiently familiar with the issue” three times, and “Other” once.

My “no fact of the matter” answers were something I’m not especially confident about, though my “other” answer, to the politics question, is something I’m fairly confident about, and I think my beliefs about politics are shared in practice (if not in rhetoric) by most people in the first world. Two of my “accept” answers were things I thought everybody agreed about (that you should throw the switch in the basic trolley case, and non-skeptical realism about the external world.) Another was something that often seems a matter of consensus, though I suspect disagreement is a bit more common (scientific realism). That leaves me with basically the small number of definite controversial positions I thought I had to start out with.

In short, at first glance the Philosophical Survey made me think about all the issues where I lean one way or another, but otherwise mostly reinforced my self-image as someone with just a few definite controversial views. Yet I may be wrong to think my views on the trolley problem, external world realism, and scientific realism are non-controversial. And it may be that the typical pattern of philosophical beliefs among people in the academic philosophy world is close to mine: strong views on your favorite issues, with a mix of vague inclinations and total agnosticism elsewhere.

If you’re the kind of person who can answer lots of questions about your philosophical views, I’d love to see a summary of your responses to the Philosophica Survey similar to what I’ve written here, and your thoughts about likely distributions of responses. Of course, when the actual survey data comes out, I’ll probably blog about it.

Filed under: epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy
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