English 1101

Study Questions

Epistemology—The Search For Truth

1. What is the difference between empirical truth and necessary truth (147-151)?

2. What is the difference between rationalism and empiricism (151-153)?

3. What one belief usually distinguishes rationalist philosophers (like Descartes and Kant) from empiricist philosophers ( like Locke and Hume)?

4. What are innate ideas?

5. What is the two-world assumption?  Does it seem reasonable?

6. Why did Descartes set out to doubt the reality of everything?

7. What is the relationship between David Hume’s two kinds of justifiable statement—“truth of reason” and “matter of fact” (gray box, 160)—and the empirical and necessary truths of 1 above?

8. What does a priori mean?

9. What does David Hume want to do with statements that are neither “truths of reason” (like mathematics) nor “matters of fact”?  What about statements like “Everything that happens has a cause,” “Life has meaning,” and “God exists”?

10. Clearly Hume’s philosophy is hostile to religion, but what about science?  Doesn’t science depend on cause and effect?

11. Immanuel Kant set out to save the world from David Hume.  How did he resolve the problem posed by Hume’s philosophy?  What is a synthetic a priori truth for Kant (163)?

12. What is the scientific method?  Are scientists rationalists or empiricists (2 above)?

13. Why is the correspondence theory of truth inadequate?

14. Would scientists be more likely to subscribe to the coherence theory of the pragmatic theory of truth?  Why?

15. Could a scientist believe in innate ideas?  Which ideas?

16. Why should we be rational?  How can we be sure that the universe is rational?

Relating to “Philosophy, Sex, Race, and Culture”

17. How could women’s viewpoints change the epistemology of science?  See “Gendered Points of View” (307) and “Feminist Epistemology and Feminist Science” (331).