Sample Questions for Philosophy 3412 Test 1
I.
Introductory issues; the scientific revolution
1. What are the two main questions GS thinks we should try to develop answers to in
philosophy of science?
2. Contrast the narrow and broad uses of ‘science’ that GS distinguishes.
3. What sort of philosophical issue is our main concern in philosophy of science?
4. Explain the difference between descriptive and normative theories.
5. What are the three principle ideas or issues GS considers as ‘starting points’ for thinking
about science?
6. How does GS see empiricism connected to science?
7. What makes social structure an important aspect of science, according to GS’s third starting
point?
8. What were some of the problems for a Copernican account of the solar system?
9. What is instrumentalism?
10. What does mechanism hold? Contrast mechanism with Aristotle’s use of teleological
explanations. Do you think we still have room in science for teleology? Or is everything (at
least for the purposes of science) ultimately to be explained in mechanical terms? Discuss. *
11. What were three important 19th century developments in biology?
12. Explain why Cunningham and Williams locate the scientific revolution so much later than is
traditional. Do you think this constitutes a real difference between their view of the history
and the traditional view? Or is it mainly a difference of terminological preferences?
Discuss. *
II. Logic and Empiricism.
1. Describe the sensationalist account of the mind.
2. What is inductive skepticism?
3. What is Mill’s phenomenalist account of matter?
4. Describe Kant’s compromise between rationalism and empiricism.
5. What is the analytic-synthetic distinction?
6. What is the verifiability theory of meaning?
7. How did the logical empiricists explain the fact that geometry seems to be both
mathematics (and so analytic) and at the same time tells us about the structure of the world
(and so synthetic)?
8. Why was the formulation of inductive logic such a central project for the logical empiricists?
9. Distinguish between the context of justification and the context of discovery.
10. Explain Neurath’s ship metaphor for our epistemic efforts.
11. What is the Duhem-Quine thesis?
12. Why were the logical empiricists uncomfortable with treating the entities of theoretical
physics (electrons, photons etc.) as real? How do you feel about this issue? Discuss &
defend your position. *
III. Induction and Confirmation.
1. Explain Hume’s problem of induction. Do you think Hume was right to conclude that we
simply have no reason whatsoever to suppose that induction will work? Discuss & defend
your position.
2. What does GS mean by ‘induction’? ‘Projection’? ‘Explanatory inference’?
3. What were Hempel’s and Carnap’s preferred approaches to the problem of induction?
4. How does GS argue that hypothetico-deductivism seems to be hopeless (despite its intuitive
appeal)?
5. Explain the selection task. What common mistake do people make in response to this task?
6. Explain Goodman’s puzzle about induction.
7. What is Goodman’s definition of ‘grue’? ‘bleen’? Explain how Nicod’s criterion and the
principle of equivalence give rise to the Ravens puzzle. Do you think this shows that
instances (per se) can’t confirm a generalization? Or does it show that what confirms one
sentence may not confirm a logically equivalent sentence? Or ...? Justify your position. *
8. What is Hempel’s third reason (hint: it’s labelled (c) ) for thinking that it’s a bad idea to
revert to the traditional (Aristotelian) reading of ‘All As are Bs’ as implying not just that there
are no non-B As but also that there are As?
IV. Karl Popper.
1. What is the problem of demarcation? What is Popper’s answer to this problem?
2. What is fallibilism?
3. Explain the ‘search for the grail’ metaphor that GS uses to criticize Popper’s view of science.
4. Describe the stages involved in doing science, as Popper conceives it.
5. Explain why Popper had to shift from treating falsifiability as a logical feature of a scientific
theory to describing it as matter of how scientists treat their theories.
6. What somewhat surprising element is involved in making observations, according to
Popper?
7. What is the ‘bridge-building’ problem for Popper?
8. What makes Popper’s insistence that scientific theories be ‘at risk’ with respect to
observations important (according to GS) despite the problems with Popper’s views?
9. Why does GS think that the proper understanding of this notion of risk requires us to allow
that theories Popper thought to be pseudoscience could really be scientific?
10. What would the impact of a Precambrian rabbit on evolutionary theory be, according to GS?
11. Why does Maxwell consider the objections to Popper by Kuhn, Feyerabend and Lakatos to
be inconclusive as objections to Popper’s program even though they are basically right?
12. What is Maxwell’s own fundamental objection to Popper’s program?
V. Kuhn, Normal Science and Revolutions.
1. Explain the broad and narrow senses of the word ‘paradigm’.
2. Explain what Kuhn means by ‘normal science’.
3. Consider how Kuhn’s descriptive claims about science relate to his normative claims
(especially his claim about its efficiency); do you agree with this sociological view about how
best to investigate the world, combining what looks like a relatively irrational structure of
individual behaviour and commitments with overall progress in testing and developing
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successful paradigms? Can you think of alternative ways of organizing such an investigation
that might be preferable? (Consider in particular the ‘one paradigm at a time’ restriction.)
Why does Kuhn think it so important that scientists be very reluctant to give up a paradigm?
Why does scientific progress seem obvious during normal science and much harder to
explain/defend across scientific revolutions?
Why does the rejection of one paradigm require the adoption of another?
Do you think GS is right when he points out that many ‘revolutionary’ changes in science
don’t seem to have required a ‘crisis’ of the kind that Kuhn describes? Consider some of GS’
examples and discuss what a scientific revolution really requires. (Perhaps it’s not just a
new and important idea?)
What are the core values that are retained across revolutionary divides? Why aren’t they
enough to establish progress has occurred through the revolution? Could a later
retrospective point of view help here? Or does that just involve dubious speculation about
alternative histories we can’t actually observe?
Give an example of a dispute over the standards to be applied in evaluating scientific work.
Explain what the standards in dispute are and how they applied to alternative paradigms.
Do you think Kuhn’s appeal to ‘problem solving power’ is enough to ground a non-relativist
account of progress across scientific revolutions? If not, do you think there is some other
way to defend the idea of scientific progress even when revolutions (and major conceptual
changes) are involved? Or do you accept some form of relativism? Explain and justify your
position.
How does Reisch propose to reconcile Kuhn’s views on scientific revolutions with Carnap’s
views, as the leading logical empiricist?
What, according to Reisch, justifies choices between alternative languages, according to
Carnap?