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PHIL 0610/0612

Philosophy and Science

Final Exam Review

I. Logistics

The final exam will take place via Canvas on April 27th . It is worth 20% of the final grade for PHIL 0610 students. It is worth 10% of the final grade for PHIL 0612 students. The final exam will cover all material from modules 3, 4 and 5 (i.e., all material after and including the lecture on the 23rd  of February).

You may take the exam at any time between 9am and 11:59pm on that date. You will have one hour to complete the exam once you begin (unless I have been informed by DRS that you are entitled to additional time).

•   You may consult your notes during the exam.

•   You may not consult other students during the exam. All work you submit must be entirely your own.

•   All exam papers will be checked using AI-writing detection software. Papers that include AI- generated content will be punished with an F for the course.

•   Each student’s exam will be drawn from a pool of questions, so no two exams will be the same.

II. Overview

The role of the final exam is to assess your understanding of the course content. Accordingly, the final will focus on definitions, argument summaries, and basic factual questions. You will not be asked to come up with original objections during the exam.

The final exam will have two sections: six true/false questions and two short essays. Each true/false question is worth 1 point, each short essay is worth 7 points (for a total of 20 points for the exam).

The true/false questions will concern straightforwardly factual course content.

The short essay questions will ask you to reconstruct a philosophical argument or explain a point that we went   over in lecture. These essays need not be more than a paragraph or two, but you must define any technical terms used in the essays. There will be a choice among topics for each essay.

Grading of the short essays: The short essay will be graded solely according to whether responses accurately define or describe all the relevant concepts. Therefore, it is important that you answer all parts of the question and make sure you define all technical terms (e.g., those terms given in the list below) in your answers.

III. Terms to Know

Scientific racism, race science, double-blind randomized clinical trial, patriarchal society, patriarchal institutions, androcentric bias, stereotypes, reflective beliefs, automatic beliefs, dissociation, IATs, the traditional view of scientific objectivity, bias, social epistemology, strong objectivity, standpoints, transformative interrogation, Longino’s conception of scientific objectivity, replication, null hypothesis statistical testing, p-values, positive predictive value, prior probability, power, Type I error rate, bias (in Ioannidis’s sense), direct replication, conceptual replication, follow-up studies, the three arguments that Pashler and Harris consider that the replication crisis is overblown (and the replies), social priming controversy, epistemic trust, epistemic individualism, trustworthiness of an expert, “science as inquiry,” scientific consensus, scientific dissent vs. scientific denialism, coverage, epistemic bubble, echo chamber, science vs. technology.

IV. General Advice

The final exam is simply a test of your mastery of the course content. There should be no surprises: all of the material will be drawn from what we went over in lecture. Many of the arguments, positions, and definitions are available in the handouts themselves, so review these materials as you study for the exam. I recommend learning the definitions of all of the philosophical terms on the list given above; this will help you in every section of the exam.

As always, feel free to discuss any questions you have with me or your TA during office hours, or set up an appointment with one of us.