Deck 3: The Search For Knowledge

Question 1

Epistemology concerns philosophical questions about knowledge.

Answer 1

True

Question 2

Descartes came to be certain that his body and the external world existed,because of his belief that there was a good God.

Answer 2

True

Question 3

Descartes initially employed skeptical doubt in order to arrive at certainty.

Answer 3

True

Question 4

"Tadpoles become frogs" is an example of a posteriori knowledge.

Question 5

When Descartes found that his first certainty was his belief that he existed,he was referring to his body.

Question 6

Socrates believed that all our knowledge comes from experience.

Question 7

Plato believed that arriving at knowledge is a process of recollection.

Question 8

The skeptics who followed Pyrrho claimed that it is impossible to say "the honey appears to me to be sweet."

Question 9

Someone who claimed that we can have scientific knowledge but not religious knowledge would be called a limited skeptic.

Question 10

A priori knowledge is knowledge that is justified independently of experience

Question 11

Descartes doubted every one of his beliefs except those that were based on solid sense experience.

Question 12

Descartes's argument for the existence of God was based on the premise that the universe had to have a cause.

Question 13

According to Plato and the traditional definition of knowledge,having a true belief is sufficient to have knowledge.

Question 14

In your reading from Plato's Phaedo,Socrates argues that our souls must have existed before our birth.

Question 15

The skeptic believes that if it is possible to doubt a belief,then that belief cannot constitute knowledge.

Question 16

Ideas that are inborn or that the mind already contains prior to experience are called innate ideas.

Question 17

According to Plato,since justice is not something that can be perceived,we can only have different opinions about it,but not knowledge.

Question 18

The statement "There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses" expresses empiricism.

Question 19

René Descartes believed that all true knowledge must be based upon the traditions of the past.

Question 20

Logically necessary truths are examples of a posteriori knowledge.

Question 21

The view that all truth is relative to a particular culture is known as "subjectivism."

Question 22

In John Locke's terminology,the experience of the sweetness of sugar would be an idea.

Question 23

Because George Berkeley believed all knowledge is based on experience,he did not believe in God.

Question 24

The empiricists reject the notion of innate ideas.

Question 25

Kant believed that the truth of "all events will have a cause" was based on experience.

Question 26

Locke agreed with Descartes that we could not get our idea of perfection from experience.

Question 27

Hume believed that we can never experience the self.

Question 28

Kant tried to form a compromise between rationalism and empiricism.

Question 29

According to Locke,the idea of an apple is a complex idea.

Question 30

David Hume believed that reason can only tell us about the relationship between our ideas.

Question 31

David Hume concluded that the one thing we could not reasonably doubt was the principle of induction.

Question 32

According to your text,Friedrich Nietzsche had nothing but disdain for subjective relativism.

Question 33

Immanuel Kant accepted without question the principles of Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics.

Question 34

According to your text,objectivism is a dogmatic,authoritarian position in which the speaker claims that he or she has the absolute truth.

Question 35

If one is an epistemological relativist,then one is committed to being an ethical relativist also.

Question 36

While Locke believed knowledge about the physical world was based on experience,he did not think we could gain moral knowledge from experience.

Question 37

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker uses experiments with infants to support empiricism.

Question 38

Nietzsche claimed that his philosophy provided absolute truth,while other philosophies were simply interpretations of the objective truth.

Question 39

By denying that there is a world external to our minds,Berkeley believed he had refuted skepticism.

Question 40

When David Hume refers to "impressions," he is speaking of vague,intuitive hunches.

Question 41

William James applied his pragmatic theory of truth to religious belief.

Question 42

According to your text,the only major philosophical movement to originate in America is pragmatism.

Question 43

Philosophers,following Plato,have traditionally defined knowledge as

A) true justified belief.
B) a belief that someone embraces with conviction.
C) any opinion which is true and leads to a successful life.
D) something which is true,whether anyone is aware of it or not.

Question 44

According to Dewey,we should search for absolute truths that are eternal and necessary.

Question 45

According to your text,gender refers to the biological differences between males and females.

Question 46

John Dewey had an influence on theories of education.

Question 47

According to your text,the term "epistemology" comes from two Greek words that mean

A) searching and wisdom.
B) knowledge and rational discourse.
C) questions and answers.
D) opinion and belief.

Question 48

According to pragmatism,ideas are tools we use for solving practical problems.

Question 49

The adjective "empirical" refers to

A) knowledge that is based on a definition.
B) a claim for which no support is provided.
C) anything that is based on experience.
D) a logically necessary truth.

Question 50

The pragmatists believed there was an enormous difference between the pattern of inquiry used in the sciences and that which is used in morality and religion.

Question 51

Aristotle argued that women were equally as capable as men of being rational.

Question 52

Feminists reject the generic humanity assumption.

Question 53

One of the three epistemological questions discussed in the text is

A) Is there such a thing as mental telepathy?
B) Is scientific knowledge incompatible with religious faith?
C) What is the meaning of life?
D) Does our knowledge represent reality as it really is?

Question 54

James argued that we should believe whatever we find it most comfortable to believe.

Question 55

The pragmatists rejected the correspondence theory of truth.

Question 56

Feminism emphasizes the role of gender in shaping how we think.

Question 57

There were no women philosophers prior to the nineteenth century.

Question 58

The claim "Either my team will win their next game or they won't" is an example of

A) a logically necessary truth and a priori knowledge.
B) a logically necessary truth and a posteriori knowledge.
C) factual information about the world and a posteriori knowledge.
D) empirical knowledge.

Question 59

The pragmatists claimed that we can have no guarantee that any belief is immune from the need to be revised in the future.

Question 60

The pragmatists thought that the "pragmatic" and the "theoretical" were complete opposites.

Question 61

Plato believed that true knowledge is always based on

A) Universals.
B) the information gained from our emotions and feelings.
C) the concrete,particular things that we experience.
D) the collective wisdom of society which is transmitted through our cultural traditions.

Question 62

Descartes's principle "there must be as much reality in the cause as there is in the effect" was used to prove the existence of

A) his soul.
B) his body.
C) God.
D) the evil demon.

Question 63

Descartes's argument for God's existence is based on

A) the need for a reason to be moral.
B) the fact that the universe requires a cause.
C) Descartes's own idea of perfection.
D) the order and design in the world.

Question 64

According to the rationalist,logical truths,mathematical truths,and metaphysical truths are all examples of which kind of knowledge?

A) empirical knowledge
B) a posteriori knowledge
C) a priori knowledge
D) truths that do not tell us anything about the world.

Question 65

A universal belief falsifier is

A) an argument against religious belief.
B) a possible state of affairs that would prevent us from distinguishing true beliefs from false ones.
C) someone who enjoys destroying other people's beliefs.
D) a method for identifying which of our beliefs are false,so that we will end up with only true beliefs.

Question 66

Descartes uses the case of the "phantom limb" to demonstrate that

A) you can't always trust common folk tales.
B) it is possible to be mistaken in believing that one's body exists.
C) there are spiritual beings that exist beyond the bounds of science.
D) reason must be guided by the senses.

Question 67

According to Descartes,the explanation of how he had the idea of God in his mind is that

A) he intuited it from the beauty and grandeur of the universe.
B) God planted the idea within him.
C) his conscience and inner moral feelings led him to the idea of God.
D) all of the above

Question 68

The primary reason that Descartes doubted so many things was

A) to show how foolish the ideas of his teachers were.
B) to find if there was any belief that was certain.
C) he was trying to attack religious belief.
D) he had lost the will to go on living.

Question 69

Descartes decided to suspend judgment concerning any belief only if the following condition was the case:

A) he was absolutely certain the belief was false
B) he could think of any possibility that the belief could be mistaken
C) the truth or falsity of the belief had no important consequences
D) the belief did not conform to the accepted body of knowledge of his time

Question 70

Descartes's first bedrock of certainty was

A) "God exists."
B) "I am not now dreaming."
C) "I am,I exist."
D) "I have a body."

Question 71

According to Descartes,the significance of dreams is

A) we sometimes arrive at the solution to problems in our dreams.
B) we learn about our hidden desires in our dreams.
C) there is no way to distinguish dreaming from being awake.
D) dreams are provoked by events in the external world.

Question 72

In your reading from Plato's dialogue Phaedo,Socrates discusses

A) the relationship between philosophy and the religious beliefs of his day.
B) the method for forming a truly good society and appointing its leaders.
C) how we can have knowledge of perfect justice,beauty,goodness,and equality.
D) why it is impossible to harm a truly good person.

Question 73

The text referred to René Descartes's strategy for finding certainty as

A) the scientific method.
B) the inference to the best explanation.
C) the Socratic method.
D) methodological skepticism.

Question 74

In his initial examination of his beliefs,the one thing that Descartes could not doubt was that

A) he was doubting.
B) he had a body.
C) 2 + 3 = 5.
D) he was awake and not dreaming.

Question 75

According to your text,Descartes believed,contrary to what seems obvious,it is possible that 2 + 3 = 17 - 1/2 because

A) mathematics doesn't have the certainty of sense experience.
B) mathematics is based on arbitrary assumptions.
C) an evil demon could be deceiving his mind.
D) he could be dreaming.

Question 76

Gottfried Leibniz's comparison of the mind to a block of marble was used to illustrate his theory that

A) the innate structure of the mind results in natural inclinations to think in certain ways.
B) the way in which the mind is formed is purely a result of experience.
C) the human mind has certain prejudices which block the acquisition of truth.
D) the mind is really the brain.

Question 77

The followers of Pyrrho held that nothing can be proven because

A) either we will have an infinite regress of reasons or we will assume what we are trying to prove.
B) it is possible that an evil being is confusing our minds.
C) all knowledge must be based on religious faith and not reason.
D) proofs are based on language,but language is ambiguous.

Question 78

Innate ideas are ideas that

A) are acquired through experience.
B) based on an individual's cultural traditions.
C) can never be known to be true.
D) the mind already contains prior to experience.

Question 79

The skeptic who believed communication is impossible and who responded to opponents by simply wagging his finger was

A) Pyrrho of Elis.
B) Carneades.
C) Cratylus.
D) David Hume.

Question 80

Which of the following was one of the three anchor points of rationalism?

A) Scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge there is.
B) The fundamental truths about the world can be known a priori.
C) There is no God.
D) The reasons we have for our beliefs are nothing more than human opinions.