Most of the interesting options in the original PhilPapers Survey are collapsed into ‘Other’. This makes it needlessly tempting to side with one of the named positions in order to make one’s answer usefully contentful. It also makes our comparisons to the original poll much cruder. The original survey provided (regularly used) options for: ‘accept all’, ‘reject all’, ‘accept an intermediate view’, ‘accept an alternative’, ‘the question is too unclear to answer’, ‘there is no fact of the matter’, ‘insufficiently familiar with the issue’, and ‘agnostic/undecided’.
The current format discourages changing your mind (e.g., it exacerbates consistency bias) because it disallows changing your old votes. A lot of these issues are difficult and require research and re-evaluation; rather than encouraging thoughtful and dynamic reasoning of this sort, our version of the poll seems to primarily encourage rushed and static (and often sloppily dismissive) judgments.
Some of the original explanations of the options are a bit too incomplete or misleading. I’m not attacking the idea of adding explanations—we aren’t professional philosophers, and in any case our deeper goal should be to encourage more research into the more interesting of these topics, not just to acquire a static snapshot of our ideological commitments. But we should be more systematic about providing adequate explanations for every question, and we should rely mostly or entirely on quotations from authorities defining the relevant terms, so as to put as minimal a spin on the questions as possible.
The specific questions seem to be based on an older, inferior version of the survey. “Language: Russelleanism or Fregeanism?” should be “Proper Names: Millian or Fregean?”. Libertarian incompatibilism should be distinguished from the view that we simply don’t have free will. The “personal identity” question should clarify “biological view” in lieu of “physical view”, and add the “further-fact view” option. And the newer version also has “communitarianism” as an option alongside liberal egalitarianism and libertarianism (which is significant because, e.g., most Continental philosophers who answered the poll favored communitarianism). All of these changes are present in the main PhilPapers Survey.
In the interests of beginning to resolve all 4 issues, I’ve put together a hub of resources here, in a Google Doc for clarifying the meanings of the 30 questions. You can add questions, suggestions for changes and additions, and votes as Comments, and if there’s enough interest I’ll make another Doc (or something more structured) for hosting a revisable database of votes on these issues.
A few problems with this LW survey:
Most of the interesting options in the original PhilPapers Survey are collapsed into ‘Other’. This makes it needlessly tempting to side with one of the named positions in order to make one’s answer usefully contentful. It also makes our comparisons to the original poll much cruder. The original survey provided (regularly used) options for: ‘accept all’, ‘reject all’, ‘accept an intermediate view’, ‘accept an alternative’, ‘the question is too unclear to answer’, ‘there is no fact of the matter’, ‘insufficiently familiar with the issue’, and ‘agnostic/undecided’.
The current format discourages changing your mind (e.g., it exacerbates consistency bias) because it disallows changing your old votes. A lot of these issues are difficult and require research and re-evaluation; rather than encouraging thoughtful and dynamic reasoning of this sort, our version of the poll seems to primarily encourage rushed and static (and often sloppily dismissive) judgments.
Some of the original explanations of the options are a bit too incomplete or misleading. I’m not attacking the idea of adding explanations—we aren’t professional philosophers, and in any case our deeper goal should be to encourage more research into the more interesting of these topics, not just to acquire a static snapshot of our ideological commitments. But we should be more systematic about providing adequate explanations for every question, and we should rely mostly or entirely on quotations from authorities defining the relevant terms, so as to put as minimal a spin on the questions as possible.
The specific questions seem to be based on an older, inferior version of the survey. “Language: Russelleanism or Fregeanism?” should be “Proper Names: Millian or Fregean?”. Libertarian incompatibilism should be distinguished from the view that we simply don’t have free will. The “personal identity” question should clarify “biological view” in lieu of “physical view”, and add the “further-fact view” option. And the newer version also has “communitarianism” as an option alongside liberal egalitarianism and libertarianism (which is significant because, e.g., most Continental philosophers who answered the poll favored communitarianism). All of these changes are present in the main PhilPapers Survey.
In the interests of beginning to resolve all 4 issues, I’ve put together a hub of resources here, in a Google Doc for clarifying the meanings of the 30 questions. You can add questions, suggestions for changes and additions, and votes as Comments, and if there’s enough interest I’ll make another Doc (or something more structured) for hosting a revisable database of votes on these issues.