week 2 answer the philosophy questions

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1. Modern-day, more sophisticated versions of mind-body identity theory

	a.	say that belief in physical science requires as much faith as belief in religion.
	b.	back away from saying that every single mental phenomenon that has a mental description has a physical description.
	c.	deny that there are any nonphysical entities such as minds or souls, so these terms do not refer to anything they are attempting to define or explain.
	d.	allow for the possibility that there may be some mental events--at the sub-atomic level of quarks, leptons, or hadrons, for example--that are not actually physical events.
	e.	believe that experiments in neurophysics prove the truth of mind-body identity theory beyond a shadow of a doubt.

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QUESTION 2

1. The question that philosophers ask about how it can be possible for something physical to causally interact with something nonphysical comes under the heading of

	a.	the law of contradiction.
	b.	the appearance-reality distinction.
	c.	the free will problem.
	d.	the mind-body problem.
	e.	the law of cause and effect.

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QUESTION 3

1. Which of the following best applies to the philosophical position of skepticism?

	a.	Knowledge can be attained only through experience of what is real.
	b.	All knowledge is relative to the knowing subject.
	c.	Some forms of knowledge are constituted by true but unjustified belief.
	d.	The human attainment of certain knowledge is impossible.
	e.	It is false to equate knowledge with power.

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QUESTION 4

1. Identify the epistemological position which claims that the human mind is, at birth, a tabula rasa (a blank slate), onto which the facts of experience are written; moreover, the sum of our experience forms the basis of human knowledge.

	a.	Experiential Epistemology
	b.	Empiricism
	c.	Rational Sensationism
	d.	Conceptualism
	e.	Scientific Realism

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QUESTION 5

1. According to Locke’s “Representational Theory of Knowledge,”

	a.	all empirical propositions are certain.
	b.	ideas are not caused by anything; they are original sources of knowledge.
	c.	only our ideas of primary qualities provide true pictures of the external world.
	d.	only our ideas of secondary qualities provide true pictures of the external world.
	e.	only innate ideas can accurately represent reality.

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QUESTION 6

1. Berkeley’s epistemology leads him to the ontological position that

	a.	reality does not actually exist.
	b.	only God exists.
	c.	minds and ideas constitute a separate world from the physical world of matter.
	d.	mind and matter both exist, but we can perceive only the effects of matter.
	e.	all that exists in realty are minds and ideas in minds.

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QUESTION 7

1. In discussing the controversy in philosophy between the empiricists and the rationalists, Russell explains that although both schools of thought got some things right and some things wrong, the rationalists were right in asserting that

	a.	a priori knowledge is itself a product of experience.
	b.	all knowledge of existing things comes only through experience.
	c.	we do in fact have a priori knowledge of logical or general principles that cannot themselves be proved by experience.
	d.	from general consideration as to what must be the case, facts about existing things in the actual world can be deduced.
	e.	only a priori knowledge can inform our judgments of what is useful or what is virtuous.

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QUESTION 8

1. Not only does Hume revitalize skepticism about the existence of God; he also provides compelling arguments against there being any reason to believe in the existence of __________ or __________.

	a.	perception; thought
	b.	the mind; the body
	c.	plants; animals
	d.	enduring substances; causality
	e.	logic; mathematics

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QUESTION 9

1. Bertrand Russell gives us the example of the chicken who is surprised one day when the man who has come to fed it every day instead wrings its neck. What philosophical point or principle is he attempting to illustrate with this story?

	a.	Knowledge by acquaintance necessarily fails.
	b.	Only humans have the capacity of rational thought.
	c.	Hume’s “problem of induction”: association does not necessarily entail causation.
	d.	Every proposition we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted.
	e.	Where we are concerned not merely with what does exist, but with whatever might exist, no reference to actual particulars is involved.

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QUESTION 10

1. Hume’s critique of the Principle of Induction (or Hume’s “Problem of Induction”) may be formulated as follows:

	a.	Belief in the principle of induction is based on circular reasoning.
	b.	Belief in the principle of induction is unnecessary for the conduct of everyday life.
	c.	The principle of induction is useless in the practice of scientific investigation.
	d.	The human mind never actually reasons inductively.
	e.	All reasoning is by definition deductive.

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QUESTION 11

1. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume all agree that

	a.	God exists for those who believe strongly enough.
	b.	everything is made of ideas.
	c.	all substances are combinations of form and matter, or mind and body.
	d.	sensory experience is an important source of our ideas about the world.
	e.	all of the above.

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QUESTION 12

1. Kant’s “Copernican Revolution in Epistemology” is represented in his claim that

	a.	there are many “things in themselves” that we can know through pure reason.
	b.	the fact that the Earth circles the sun can be known by the human mind.
	c.	the human mind contributes features to what can be known about reality.
	d.	it is acceptable to humans to remain skeptical about the possibility of empirical knowledge.
	e.	the task of philosophy, rather than building metaphysical systems, should be to analyze language.

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QUESTION 13

1. Kant uses the terms noumena and phenomena in his account of the nature and extent of human knowledge. These refer, respectively, to

	a.	a priori and a posteriori
	b.	primary qualities and secondary qualities
	c.	things in themselves and things as they appear to us.
	d.	substances and their properties.
	e.	analysis and synthesis.

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QUESTION 14

1. What was the main philosophical problem that Hume left unsolved and Kant attempted to resolve?

	a.	There is no empirical evidence for the existence of the mind, so Kant must show that we can have non-empirical knowledge of both the mind and the world.
	b.	All the arguments for God’s existence miss the main point; belief in God must rely on faith alone.
	c.	The soul clearly exists as a spiritual substance—we can feel it and know it with our hearts and minds—but its empirical existence goes against faith.
	d.	The world is made purely of ideas and nothing else, so we must believe that God exists if we are to think of ourselves as more than a mere idea.
	e.	We have no rationally justified reason for claiming to have certain knowledge of causation or the existence of material substance as a ground of sensible properties.

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QUESTION 15

1. Kant’s solution relies on conceiving of the possibility of a category of knowledge claims denied by other philosophers. For Kant, we do have experience and hence empirical knowledge of time and space; such claims are both

	a.	temporal and spatial
	b.	analytic and a posteriori
	c.	synthetic and a posteriori
	d.	analytic and a priori
	e.	synthetic and a priori

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QUESTION 16

1. Philosophers in the analytic tradition value Hume’s contribution to philosophy for its

	a.	adherence to the metaphysics of past generations of both rationalist and empiricist thinkers.
	b.	scathing critiques of philosophical and religious doctrines that rely on neither logical necessity nor empirical discovery.
	c.	enhancement of the Cartesian concept of the self as the one real thing that can be known, understood, and observed “from the inside.”
	d.	discovery and demonstration of the Principle of Induction, which states that the future will be like the past.
	e.	arguments showing that events in nature, and the cosmos in general, necessarily follow law-like patterns; hence we can feel certain that our causal predictions rest on firm and certain grounds.

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QUESTION 17

1. Which of the following best characterizes the central claim that Frank Jackson argues for in his article, “Epiphenomenal Qualia”?

	a.	Any complete or satisfactory Physicalist theory about reality entails not only that qualia, as purely mental entities or states, must themselves be both physical and causally efficacious; otherwise, they could not exist.
	b.	The case of “super-color-perceiver” Fred and the case of Mary, the brilliant neurophysiologist both prove that perception and sensation are different for everyone; we have no rational grounds for assuming what anyone else’s qualia are like.
	c.	Someone who has all the physical information about a thing or a state of affairs knows everything that can possibly be known about that thing or state of affairs.
	d.	The subjective, experiential qualities of perception and sensation, such as the smell of a rose or the particular color or taste of a ripe apple, are simply effects of various brain states which themselves have no causal efficacy.
	e.	Qualia, conceived as purely mental states knowable only to the subject having such states, do not exist; philosophers who believe in such entities should be called “qualia freaks” for insisting on believing in something that has no physical purpose and no objectivity.

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QUESTION 18

1. Thomas Nagel claims that conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon that occurs at many levels of animal life, and he goes on to say that regardless of the particular form of animal consciousness, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means that

	a.	it has the ability to use language and think in terms of symbols.
	b.	it can be thoroughly understood, both objectively and subjectively, by other conscious beings.
	c.	it has a life worth living.
	d.	it must have something like a soul, or spiritual existence.
	e.	there is something it is like to be that organism—there must be some sort of particular experiential character or “feel” that goes along with being conscious.

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QUESTION 19

1. In his “Chinese Room” thought experiment, John Searle attempts to show that

	a.	the Chinese language can never really be understood by English speakers.
	b.	knowing the syntax, or formal rules, of a language is sufficient for understanding that language.
	c.	symbol manipulation, as current-day computers can do, does not amount to understanding, i.e., thinking.
	d.	In essence, the human ability to think is nothing more than what the advanced computing machines of today can do.
	e.	The simple explanation of how the brain produces intentionality is precisely modeled by the way a computer instantiates a computer program.

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QUESTION 20

1. In "Minds, Brains, and Programs," Searle gives his account of human intentionality. To say that consciousness is intentional means that

	a.	self-determined behavior is the only clue to the content of conscious states.
	b.	when we are conscious, we must fully intend to be awake, aware, and "tuned in."
	c.	our conscious acts are always about something; that is, directed towards objects, events, situations, etc.
	d.	anything done or said by accident should not have moral implications for a person.
	e.	nothing about being conscious necessarily implies ethical responsibility.

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QUESTION 21

1. This is the Week Two Pre-Test.

True

False