Possible Final Exam Questions Principles of Inquiry

Note: each of the following questions asks you to explain some claim, argument, or idea found in one or more of the readings. I will also, sometimes, ask you to say what you think about the ideas (etc.) I have asked you to explain.

1. According to a more traditional understanding of science, scientific revolutions lead to new interpretations of “observations that themselves are fixed once and for all by the nature of the environment and of the perceptual apparatus.” (Kuhn, p.120) Kuhn rejects this view, insisting that, in some sense, “after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world.” (p.111) What reasons does Kuhn give for thinking that the traditional view must be rejected?

2. In what sense does science make progress according to Kuhn? What conception of scientific progress does Kuhn think we can no longer hang on to? (How does an analogy with biological evolution help to explain this point?)

3. Some readers have taken Kuhn to be a relativist. What aspects of his discussion of the way scientific revolutions are resolved give credence to this interpretation of his view? Why does he think his view is not relativist?

4. How do Schick and Vaughan and Fay use Donald Davidson’s ‘argument from translation’ to try to show that Kuhn must be wrong when he says that paradigms are ‘incommensurable’ and that scientists who accept different paradigms ‘are responding to a different world’? What do you think of their criticism of Kuhn?

5. How might one argue that relativism is self-refuting? What do you think?

6. Why do some people (including some feminists) think that inquiry should not be ‘value-free’?

7. Explain three ways that, according to Elizabeth Anderson, women’s ‘social location’ might give them access to knowledge that would be more difficult (or even impossible) for men to acquire.

8. What do you make of the idea that there are a variety of ways of knowing?

9. What do you make of the idea that there are ‘women’s ways of knowing’?

10. Explain the extent to which Fay thinks that it is true that culture and society makes us who we are and also the ways in which he thinks it is not true.

11. According to Brian Fay, the social sciences need to go beyond people’s own ways of understanding what they do and why they do it. How so? Does he have a good point?

12. Fay uses the ideas of ‘fallibilism’ and ‘critical intersubjectivity’ to argue that social inquiry can be objective (in a sense). How does his argument go? To what extent do you think Fay has succeeded in showing us how to face up to the importance of cultural differences without falling into relativism?

13. How far do these ideas go towards showing that political issues (and other matters of public controversy) can be resolved through objective inquiry? (I.e., does Fay’s theory of social inquiry also provide a solution to the fundamental problem of ‘citizen’s epistemology’?)