Answers at end.

True/False (True=A; False=B)

1. To ask whether whether a thing (e.g., the number "3" or an immaterial mind) really exists or only seems to exist is to engage in an ontological or metaphysical enquiry.

2. Insofar as metaphysics is concerned with the fundamental principles of the nature of reality, it raises questions about whether God exists or why there is anything at all in the universe.

3. Metaphysical or ontological questions can ultimately be reduced to questions of epistemology because questions about what we know ultimately depend on the nature of reality or existence.

4. Metaphysical dualists (e.g., Descartes) argue that the two kinds of things in the world—namely, spiritual things (minds, ideas) and material things (bodies)—cannot be explained in terms of one another.

5.  Materialism is the view that, because only physical matter and its properties exist, minds are merely manifestations of matter and are reducible to physical features.

6. Metaphysical materialists claim that all things except minds or ideas are ultimately physical or bodily.

7. For presocratic thinkers like the Milesians, the primary focus of philosophy was the search for the fundamental stuff of the world in terms of which the world could be understood.

8. Pre-Socratic philosophers (e.g., Thales, Anaximander) suggest that we can understand nature by presuming that the truly real is something constant beneath or behind the changing appearances revealed by our senses.

9. By appealing to a constant material principle, Milesian thinkers (e.g., Thales, Anaximander) suggest that reality is ultimately intelligible only in terms of the changing world of sense experience.

10. As in Anaximander's doctrine of justice or balance between hot and cold, wet and dry, Anaximenes attempts to explain how change occurs by means of his doctrine of condensation and rarefaction.

11.  Though ontological dualists claim that only two kinds of things are real, they admit that mental and physical things can ultimately be reduced to one kind of reality.

12. According to subjective idealism, there is no way to distinguish dreams or hallucinations from perceptions or experiences of what we call the "real" world.

13. In Hegel's version of Absolute idealism, everything is real in virtue of its function in the process by which Absolute Mind comes to recognize itself in and through world history.

14. Philosophical dualists like Descartes argue that mind and matter are fundamentally two different aspects of the same non-mental and non-physical substance.

15. Descartes argues that, because mental things are not in space nor do they have weight, shape, or other sensible characteristics, they are a different kind of thing than physical (material) objects.

16. In contrast to metaphysical dualists, materialists and idealists agree that physical bodies and spiritual minds are able to interact by sharing some third, non-material, non-mental character.

17. Metaphysical dualists (e.g., Descartes) argue in favor of their position by pointing out that both materialists and idealists are unable to explain how physical bodies and spiritual minds interact.

18.  A philosophical idealist would claim that the difference between a real table and an imaginary one is that the real one is material or physical and the imaginary one exists only mentally.

19. A philosophical idealist would claim that a table is a collection of ideas that are themselves said to exist only if there is some material or physical brain in which they reside.

20. To say that materialism is a form of ontological monism means that it identifies what is real in terms of the practical (pragmatic) value of things.

21. A metaphysical materialist is someone who claims that all behavior (including inanimate and human behavior) should be understood in terms of matter in motion.

22. The problem of "other minds" is concerned with the question of how we can determine whether other human beings have minds.

23. According to metaphysical or ontological behaviorism, all statements about minds, mental life, or mental events can be expressed in terms of behaviors.

24. In B. F. Skinner's version of behaviorism, external behaviors are more real than the internal minds or mental events that the behaviors mirror or parallel.

25. The metaphysical behaviorist says that since the self is merely a construct or bundle of perceptions, there must be a continuous substantial self that constructs the bundle.

26. Metaphysical behaviorists argue that minds or mental events (e.g., ideas) are nothing more than particular physical behaviors or inclinations to behave in certain patterns.

27. Metaphysical behaviorists argue that minds and ideas are best described in terms of observable behaviors.

28. According to metaphysical behaviorism, the mind is not necessarily part of the brain but is certainly controlled and influenced by the brain.

29. According to Gilbert Ryle, dualism is based on the mistake (a category mistake) of thinking that minds and bodies belong to different categories—when in fact they belong to the same category, namely, "things."

30. Gilbert Ryle's characterization of dualism as the "ghost in the machine" theory attempts to show how dualism avoids making a category mistake.

31. According to reductive materialism, the mind or consciousness is not necessarily part of the brain or a brain state but is certainly controlled and influenced by the brain.

32. According to eliminative materialists, mental events (e.g., pain), emotional states (e.g., love) and legal relations (e.g., being married) ultimately are expressible in terms of neuro-physiological activity.

33. According to eliminative materialism, what has traditionally been referred to in mental terms should now be more properly characterized in physical (specifically, neurological) terms.

34. According to reductive materialists, the fact that we feel consciousness is proof that the only real mental events are brain states.

35. According to neural identity theorists, thoughts are physical events (specifically neural firings) in the brain.

36. In mind-brain (or neural identity) theory, mental states or processes are simply physiological or neurological events or processes that occur in the brain.

37. Eliminative materialists suggest that, for purposes of accuracy and clarity, we should limit our ways of speaking about mental events to purely materialistic terminology.

38. Reductive materialists claim that, even though saying someone has an idea does not mean the same thing as saying that a neuron fires in the person's brain, both ways of speaking refer to the same neural event.

39. Unlike behaviorists and identity theorists, eliminative materialists argue that mental states are real and cannot be equated with or reduced to physical states.

40. To say that behaviorist accounts of consciousness are macro-level accounts (vs. micro-level accounts) means that thought is understood as a product of heredity rather than environment.

41 . According to functionalists, computers cannot think because they do not have a human physiology or anatomy (e.g., a brain).

42. According to functionalists, thinking is not limited only to biological beings because mental events are characterized by their behavioral output, not by how that output is produced.

43. The point of a Turing test is to show that, regardless of how sophisticated computers could become, they cannot ultimately be said to think.

44. Philosophic pluralism argues that a universal or comprehensive truth about reality is purely subjective and relative to each person.

45. Metaphysical dualists and pluralists can ultimately be identified as monists because both dualism and pluralism each end up saying that all reality is fundamentally one kind of thing.

46. According to ontological pluralism, reality consists of a variety of things or different kinds of things that cannot be reduced to one or two categories.

47. Ontological pluralism argues that universal claims about reality are subjective and relative to each person.

48. Aristotle's ontology exemplifies pluralism insofar as (for Aristotle) differences in the kinds or species of things change depending on how we decide to arrange them.

49. For Aristotle, each thing has a particular essence or nature that defines it as that particular kind of thing.

50. Anti-realists such as Plato argue that even though some things are social constructs, there is a true reality that exists apart from us and our social or institutional practices.

51. Anti-metaphysical positions (e.g., verificationism/positivism, pragmatism) raise doubts about ontology in general because they support a materialist paradigm rather than a dualist or pluralist paradigm.

52. According to metaphysical anti-realists, reality is not something independent of our thinking but is rather a social, institutional (e.g., linguistic) construct that might even be based on masculine prejudices.
 

Multiple Choice

53. The question "What does it mean for something to exist?" is different from the question "What does it mean for us to know that something exists?"  The difference between the two questions highlights the difference between two branches of philosophy, namely:
 (a) epistemology and aesthetics.
 (b) epistemology and logic.
 (c) axiology and ontology/metaphysics.
 (d) ontology/metaphysics and epistemology.

54. Thales of Miletos proposed that everything in the world is ultimately made up of water.  In suggesting this way of thinking about the world, he displayed a shift in attitude away from mythic thinking to what became known as philosophy insofar as he attempted to provide:
 (a) a reason for why ice melts and for why steam condenses to form water.
 (b) a justification for substituting philosophy for myth.
 (c) an answer for why Anaximander's theory of "the Indeterminate" still had to rely on mythic concepts (like injustice and reparation) to explain change.
 (d) a way of making all things intelligible in terms of something constant and universal.

55. Metaphysics attempts to provide a rational explanation for why things in nature are the way that they are.  This is different from a mythic explanation, insofar as myth provides:
  (a) a way to act rather than a way to understand.
  (b) a materialist rather than an idealist people.
  (c) a natural account of supernatural events.
  (d) a supernatural account of how things come to be.

56. Even though Anaximander agrees with Thales that all things are real and intelligible in terms of a material principle, he argues that that principle cannot be water but rather must be the "Indeterminate," because:
  (a) anything with determinate characteristics (e.g., water) cannot be the ultimate principle in terms of which other contrary things (e.g., fire) are understood.
  (b) the Indeterminate or Unlimited is experienced by itself whenever any one of the other four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) is experienced.
  (c) it makes no sense to say that water is the ultimate metaphysical principle if it is possible that natural changes occur as a result of being "moved" by the gods that are in all things.
  (d) unlike water, the Indeterminate has specific characteristics (hot-cold, wet-dry, rough-smooth, light-dark) that are apparent in sense experience.

57. For Descartes, because the mental (spiritual) and the physical (material) can be conceived distinctly, there is good reason to think that they are really different kinds of things and are distinguishable insofar as:
  (a) mental things (e.g., ideas) exhibit characteristics that some bodies exhibit, just as physical things (e.g., brains) exhibit characteristics that some minds exhibit.
  (b) when compared to real, physical, sensibly experienced things in the world, mental things must ultimately be considered as imaginary or illusory.
  (c) mental things are not in space, they have no weight or shape and are not sensibly experienceable; whereas physical things do have these characteristics.
  (d) mental things (for example, my own ideas) are the only real things in the world; everything physical or bodily is really a projection of my own mind.

58. Mind-body interaction and the knowledge of other minds are problems for dualists like Descartes because they raise questions concerning:
  (a) how a purely spiritual thing known only through introspection can affect and be affected by a purely material thing known only through sensible observation.
  (b) whether one's mind or soul (which supposedly is free from being determined to think by material influences) can exist after other people or minds see that the body dies.
  (c) how a person can know what is going on in someone else's mind without being able to know whether there are any physical or bodily things in the world at all.
  (d) whether the dualist's belief in the existence of minds and bodies is based on first-person introspection or third-person observation.

59. Mind-body interaction and the knowledge of other minds are problems for dualists like Descartes because they raise a number of questions.  Which of the following IS NOT a typical objection to dualism:
  (a) how can a purely spiritual thing known only through introspection affect and be affected by a purely material thing known only through sensible observation?
  (b) how can a mind or soul exist after other people or minds see that the body dies?
  (c) how can a person know what is going on in someone else's mind or even whether other minds exist?
  (d) how can a human being, considered as one mind-body unity, have a body which is determined by physical laws and still have a mind or soul that is free?

60. If (as Descartes argues) the mind is something spiritual (having no spatial characteristics such as place) and the brain is something physical (having no mental, thought-like characteristics), then it seems unlikely that there is any way to explain mind-body interaction.  That has not stopped philosophers from explaining how the interaction occurs or why no explanation is needed.  Which of the following IS NOT offered as one of those explanations?
  (a) Materialistic reductionism: mind and body are the same thing.
  (b) Reverse epiphenomenalism: the body is a by-product of the mind.
  (c) Parallelism: God coordinates the independent sequences of physical and mental events.
  (d) Interactionism: though they are different, mind and body cause effects in one another.

61. Idealism explains physical reality as a function of thought just as materialism explains thought as a function of matter.  In this way both theories can reduce the physical or the mental to one monistic account only by assuming a basic ontological distinction, namely that between:
 (a) appearance and reality.
 (b) truth and falsity.
 (c) reason and experience.
 (d) rationalism and empiricism.

62. If we say that thinking is a form of behavior characteristic of only biological beings, then we must conclude that, insofar as machines like computers do not exhibit biological characteristics, they do not think.  As functionalists suggest, the real issue about whether computers think would thus depend on resolving the prior question about:
  (a) whether or not machines can calculate or predict as well as human beings can.
  (b) whether thinking is inherently linked to having certain biological characteristics.
  (c) how computers lack the creativity of human thought, regardless of their speed or accuracy.
  (d) how thought is based on the rational examination of alternatives instead of random guesses.

63. Some have argued that even if a computer looked human and imitated emotions like love and fear, it would still not think, because it would have to rely on something else to bring it into existence (e.g., construction) and to maintain its ability to act (e.g., electricity).  However, this argument can be turned around to show that no human beings can be said to think, because:
  (a) thinking is not learned or programmed; it is what human beings do naturally.
  (b) human emotional activity is unconnected with rational or cognitive activity.
  (c) they cannot "imitate" emotions like love or fear as well as computers can.
  (d) they likewise do not cause their own existence and they depend on other sources of energy.

64. In Skinner's version of behaviorism, being human means nothing more than behaving in certain ways that we recognize as human.  The fact that humans behave and think in regular or predictable ways indicates that consciousness or thought itself should be understood as:
 (a) the external or observable sign of unperceivable mental activity.
 (b) observable behavior patterns (macro-events).
 (c) the neural events in the brain (micro-events).
 (d) the causes of behavior that themselves are not caused by other behaviors.

65. According to the hard behaviorism of B. F. Skinner, it is misleading (and, in fact, wrong) to talk of minds or mental events (e.g., having ideas or intentions) because such things:
 (a) are spiritual entities and cannot be described in physical terms.
 (b) are accessible (introspectively) only to the person speaking and not to anyone else.
 (c) simply do not exist.
 (d) cannot be explained by the behaviorist other than in dualistic terms.

66. In Gilbert Ryle's behaviorism, we can say that there are things like minds and intentional states, as long as we recognize that the distinction between mental and physical is only a logical (not an ontological) distinction.  Without this distinction (he claims) we could not differentiate between:
 (a) hard and soft behaviorism.
 (b) intentional and accidental behaviors.
 (c) behaviors and dispositions to behave.
 (d) observable and non-observable behaviors.

67. According to behaviorists, there is nothing necessarily wrong with referring to minds and mental processes in order to highlight the difference between actions we intend to do (for which there is a "mental" explanation) and actions that are purely accidental.  But, the behaviorists caution, this should not be taken to mean that minds or mental processes are ultimately anything other than:
  (a) the unseen causes of our behaviors or dispositions to behave in certain ways.
  (b) the social environment that determines us to behave in certain ways.
  (c) observable behaviors or dispositions to behave in certain ways.
  (d) the spiritual or mental result of our personal upbringing and experiences.

68. Some behaviorists have suggested that, even though computers have to be programmed and are not living organisms, that does not rule out the possibility that they can think.  The fact that we cannot distinguish between some computer behaviors and the behaviors of children and some adults indicates that our exclusion of computers from the category of thinking things is due simply to:
  (a) a choice to limit how we think or talk about thinking beings only to unprogrammed, living organisms.
  (b) a category mistake in which computers are inappropriately placed in the category of thinking things.
  (c) a justified rejection of the behaviorist assumption that everything (including thought) can be explained behaviorally.
  (d) our recognition that, because organisms are not genetically programmed like computers, they (unlike computers) are alive.

69. According to Ryle, dualists like Descartes fall into a category mistake when they attempt to explain the relation of the human body to the mind.  The problem, Ryle points out, is that the mind cannot affect the body and the body cannot affect the mind because:
 (a) the pineal gland is physical and therefore cannot be a point of spiritual contact.
 (b) the behavior of a mind cannot be detected as easily as the behavior of the body.
 (c) unlike bodies, minds are not things at all.
 (d) the human body is a theoretical entity which the mind identifies in terms of a particular linguistic behavior.

70. The behaviorist's approach to the question of the relationship of mind and body avoids problems normally associated with dualism, insofar as the behaviorist:
  (a) treats dualism simply as a feature or aspect of the body.
  (b) treats both mind and body as things that interact with one another but according to different laws.
  (c) treats the mind and body as different ways of talking about persons rather than different things needing to be associated.
  (d) treats the mind and body as different forms of behavior of some third kind of thing.

71. If human beings are products of their environment and conditioning (as Skinner claims), how can they be held responsible for their actions (if they were not "free" to have done otherwise)?
  (a) It only seems that people are not free; in fact, they can change their behavior if they really want to if they truly set their minds to it.
  (b) Human nature (determined genetically) restricts the options that human beings have in acting, but by holding people responsible we can change human nature.
  (c) Holding someone responsible for an action means reinforcing desirable behavior, not as a reward for past actions but to cause someone to act in desirable ways in the future.
  (d) The task of behaviorism is to recognize how the concepts of freedom and dignity have contributed to an improvement in the human condition by changing behaviors.

72. Eliminative materialists are criticized for not being able to explain emotions (e.g., love), artistic judgments, or social states (e.g., being married) in purely neurophysiological terms.  To this objection the materialist responds:
  (a)whether we say that such judgments or states are spiritual or physical is irrelevant from a practical standpoint if it makes no difference in how we live our lives.
  (b) though it might sound unromantic or too scientific, emotional, artistic, and social pronouncements nonetheless refer to nothing more than bodies in motion.
  (c) emotional, aesthetic, and social judgments are really spiritual (non-physical) events or activities that are caused ultimately by physical events or activities.
  (d) the materialist account of reality is not intended to explain every aspect of existence, but only those things that everyone already acknowledges as being physical.

73. Some critics of materialism argue that materialists cannot account in physical terms for emotions or social or legal relations (such as being married).  But materialists would reply that this is no real problem for them, since emotions and social/legal relations are simply:
  (a) bodily phenomena, behaviors, or physical arrangements.
  (b) physical manifestations of real spiritual (immaterial) events.
  (c) mental states that are correlated with (though not identical to) brain states or behaviors.
  (d) not explainable terms of metaphysics since they are not real (that is, they do not exist).

74. According to mind-brain or neural identity theory, mental events are electro-chemical events in the brain.  From such a perspective, to say that a person has a mind, then, would mean that:
 (a) the person exhibits behaviors that indicate that the person is alive.
 (b) the person's mind causes a complex and measurable pattern of neural activity.
 (c) the person has a complex brain and/or nervous system.
 (d) actual neuron firings in the brain demonstrate the presence of a spiritual consciousness.

75. Reductive materialists and neural-identity theorists acknowledge that saying that someone has an idea or experiences an emotion obviously does not mean the same thing as saying that a neuron is firing in a person's brain.  However, they argue, that fact should not prevent us from recognizing that they both ultimately refer to:
 (a) the publically observable actions of the person.
 (b) what the person thinks is really happening.
 (c) non-observable spiritual events.
 (d) micro-observable, neurological events.

76. According to eliminative materialists, folk-psychology talk about mental events should be replaced with the more precise and truthful vocabulary of neurophysiology.  But critics deny that our mental experience of pain, for example, is the same as a neurophysiological event, because:
  (a) our experience of pain cannot be caused by a neurophysiological event.
  (b) neurophysiological events are painful only if they are experienced.
  (c) our idea or experience of pain does not have the same properties as a neurophysiological event.
  (d) neurophysiological events account only for accidental behavior, whereas mental experiences can account for intentional behavior as well.

77. Critics claim that mind-brain identity theory and eliminative materialism should be rejected because they lack a feature of all good theories, namely, a procedure for determining whether they are false.  That is, neither theory:
  (a) allows us to treat mental events as if they were simply neurophysiological events.
  (b) is properly materialistic because both are versions of behaviorism.
  (c) shows how immaterial (mental) events can be correlated with or reduced to neurophysiological events.
  (d)explains what emotions or feelings are.

78. Critics of the mind-brain identity theory object that equating mental states with neural events does not rule out the possibility that mental events might still be different from physiological events.  That is, to assert that mental events are only neural events, one would have to prove that there is no such thing as a mental event.  But that could not be done simply by limiting one's account to neural events because:
 (a) mental events might actually be neural events.
 (b) physical events are never neural events.
 (c) neural and mental events might be correlated without being identical.
 (d) neural events, like mental events, are physiological activities of the brain.

79. If we say that only biological beings can think, then we must conclude that computers do not think because they do not have biological characteristics.  Functionalists, however, reject the premise that thinking is limited only to biological beings because, for functionalists, mental events are characterized by:
  (a) their ability to promote understanding and to explain how we intend certain meanings.
  (b) their behavioral output, not by how that output is produced.
  (c) their calculational or predictive speed, not their anatomical or biological features.
  (d) their immateriality, not their ability to mediate environmental input and behavioral output.

80. Critics of functionalism (such as John Searle) claim that computers cannot think because they do not understand the data they process nor can they intend anything when they process results.  To this objection, functionalists could reply that even human understanding and intentionality are simply:
  (a) the mental or spiritual recognition of certain mechanical or neuro-physiological processes.
  (b) mental but not mechanical or neuro-physiological patterns or processes.
  (c) spiritual activities that are produced by mechanical or neuro-physiological patterns or processes.
  (d) certain patterns of mechanical or neuro-physiological processes.

81. For Aristotle, kinds or species of things are distinguished from one another in a way that is different from how things in the same kind or species are distinguished from one another.  How?
  (a) The essence or form of a thing distinguishes it from other kinds or species, but its matter distinguishes it from other members of the same species.
  (b) The essence or form of a thing distinguishes it from other members of the same species, but its matter distinguishes it from other kinds or species.
  (c) The essence or form of a thing has nothing to do with distinguishing its kind or species; its matter is what distinguishes it both as a kind and as an individual.
  (d) The matter of a thing has nothing to do with distinguishing its kind or species; its form or essence is what distinguishes it both as a kind and as an individual.

82. Ordinary language philosophers claim that the best way to address the issue of how we should speak about the nature of reality is to see how we, in fact, ordinarily speak about something's being real.  If we ordinarily say that something is real in one context and that it is not real in another, then (according to these theorists):
 (a) we must recognize how what we mean by a "real" thing is itself a flexible concept.
 (b) the reality of the thing should be determined (as naive realism suggests) by its essence or form.
 (c) that context in which there is the most physical reality should be more important.
 (d) one of these ways of speaking simply must be wrong.

83. Although pragmatism and positivism differ in other respects, they are both anti-metaphysical because:
  (a) they define reality in ontological, rather than metaphysical, terms.
  (b) they insist that concepts and distinctions are meaningless unless they have a practical application
  (c) they recognize how true reality is always beyond anything we can experience.
  (d) they reject the feminist description of reality as a masculine social construction.