Final Exam

Principles of Inquiry: Ways of Knowing

Summer, 2001

 

Instructions:

            Answer all of the following questions.  Answer each question as completely and clearly as you can in about half a page (for a total of about three typed, double-spaced pages.  Mail your answers to Tom Atchison, 3734 17th Ave. So., Mpls, MN 55407 or e-mail them to tomatchison@bigfoot.com.  If you use e-mail, make sure that it is clear to me which answer goes with which question.  I need to receive your exam (and everything else you might want to turn in) by Friday August 24.  If you want your exam and or paper returned I will need a self-addressed, stamped envelope.  If you want comments e-mailed, let me know.

 

 

  1. How does Susan Haack use the model of a crossword puzzle to explain the nature of empirical inquiry (including science)?
  2. What does Richard Rorty mean by suggesting that we abandon the quest for objectivity and, instead, seek solidarity?  (In “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism” he says, “there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones ... constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers.” Alcoff, p.340)  What do you think about his views?
  3. How, according to Haack, is it true that ‘science is social’ and how is it false?
  4. Genevieve Lloyd says, “our ideals of Reason are in fact male.” (Alcoff, p.389)  Lorraine Code says, “ideal objectivity is a tacit generalization from the subjectivity of quite a small social group” (“educated, usually prosperous, white men”). (Alcoff, p.129) What, specifically, is supposed to be male about reason and objectivity as they have been understood by the Western philosophical tradition?  What do you think about this idea?
  5. How, according to Kwame A. Appiah, is traditional African religion like and unlike modern science?  Does this, in your opinion, support or undermine the idea that there is a distinctive African ‘way of knowing’?
  6. In “Multiculturalism and Objectivity” Susan Haack distinguishes a variety of forms of multiculturalism.  The form she finds most problematic she calls “epistemological counterculturalism.”  What is this view, and why does she think it is dangerous and wrong?  What do you think?