Assignment Paper

Final Exam Questions Each response has hard word limits. They must be at least 300 words, and may be at most 500 words. You will be submitting a wordcount with your response for each question. You must answer 7 questions. There is no extra credit for answering more questions – only the first 7 will be graded. Your responses will be graded on substance, specificity/focus, and effectiveness in use of the limited word count. Vague or broad answers might receive at best a C, while A answers will be focused, specific, and provide more substance. Do not use quotations: all words must be your own. 1) What does the establishment of a new science have to with a discovery, book, or theory being unprecedented and open-ended? How does the newlyestablished normal science then relate to that initial founding achievement? 2) How do machine learning algorithms sometimes provide a basis for predictions and yet not for explanation? And what does the issue of realism have to do with this? Be specific. 3) Why do we call Newton’s physics a synthesis? What did he synthesize? Illustrating with an example, explain what it means to synthesize in your chosen example. 4) Using the example of ‘planet’, describe two major shifts in the usage of this term that illustrate how conceptual revision reflect theory changes. 5) Compare and contrast two different examples of underdetermination of theory by evidence from the course. Compare and contrast these in terms of what, precisely, is underdetermined by what, precisely. In your chosen examples, how might additional evidence alter the degree or kind of underdetermination? 6) How does taxonomization, as Aristotle introduced it, build in conceptual commitments about the subject area being taxonomized? What is the difference between an essentialist and a nominalist taxonomy, and why is a nominalist taxonomy required once we acknowledge the evolution of species over time? Phil 144, Fall 2021 Professor Andersen 7) Cleland offers the possibility of a shadow biosphere that hasn’t been discovered yet, on Earth. What does this have to do with the development of instrumentation and measurement techniques and its connection to conceptual development, including in the search for exobiology? 8) What is a phenomenological law and how does it relate to descriiption versus explanation? Why is a phenomenological law important prior to the development of a unifying theory? Illustrate this with the example of Kepler’s 3rd law. 9) What is the role of “anomalies” in the process of scientific revolution? Pick an example from the course and describe how it functioned as an anomaly for the previous paradigm, as well as how later thinkers incorporated that anomaly into a new paradigm. 10)Kuhn uses the metaphor of political revolutions and applies it to the process of paradigm change in scientific revolutions. To what extent do scientific revolutions resemble political revolutions? What role does this metaphor play in the describing the process of paradigm change? 11)Both Aristotelian physics and Aristotelian biology have strong teleological characters in that teleology is used to explain features of the physical and biological worlds. Pick either the physical or the biological case and describe how, exactly, subsequent thinkers replaced Aristotle’s teleological explanations with strictly non-teleological explanations.