Paper 4: Philosophy and Scientific Practice
Also Paper HPS4 in PBT2 Psychological and Behavioural Sciences Tripos Part II
You should answer four questions in total. Answer one question from Section A and
three questions from Section B. All questions carry equal weighting.
You should spend no more than three hours on answering all the questions, and a
word limit is set of no more than 1,500 words per answer, so no more than 6,000
words for the whole paper.
All your answers for this paper should be submitted in one DOC, DOCX or PDF
document. Each answer should be clearly headed with the question number and the
question.
Put your Blind Grade Number (BGN) at the start of the document. Do not put your
name anywhere in the document.
SECTION A
1. Do all sciences need natural kinds?
2. Is there a general account of explanation, suitable for all sciences?
3. Objectivity is a common aim of the sciences. Discuss.
SECTION B
4. Is welfare economics right to rely on preference satisfaction?
5. Is rational choice modelling good science?
6. Does biology need a new “reciprocal” account of causation?
7. Are claims about current biological functions really claims about past selection
regimes?
8. Suppose someone has a benign tumour growing inside of them. It is not
causing any symptoms. Do they have a disease?
9. Is evidence from a randomised trial on drug X sufficient to infer that X is or is
not effective?
10. What are the benefits and harms of a disease screening programme? How
should these be measured?
11. Should psychiatric disease categories be defined in the same way as disease
categories in the rest of medicine?
12. All mental disorders are culture-bound. Discuss.
13. Are people with addiction responsible for their behaviour? Why or why not?
14. Did Gödel show that time travel is possible?
15. Does new physics force us to update our understanding of time, space, or
causation? Discuss with reference to an example.