Paper 5: Epistemology and Metaphysics of Science
Also Paper HPS5 in HPT3 Human, Social and Political Sciences Tripos Part IIB and
Paper 6 in PHT1 Philosophy Tripos Part IB
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. Does science make progress? If so, how?
2. Do philosophers of science need to attend to the details of how scientists work?
3. “Science is in the truth business.” Do you agree?
SECTION B
4. “If two theories account for the evidence we have, then it is irrational to choose
between them.” Do you agree?
5. “It is not an epistemological principle that one might as well hang for a sheep as
for a lamb.” How, if at all, does this comment support van Fraassen’s
constructive empiricism?
6. Should we be structural realists?
7. Are there any important differences between experiments and simulations? If
so, what are they? If not, why not?
8. Is String Theory science? Explain your answer.
9. Can we “intervene cellularly/molecularly, track behaviourally” (Bickle 2006)?
What does the answer to this question imply about the reducibility of mental
states to brain states?
10. What can scientific practice tell us about the possibility of reduction?
11. Is a model’s capacity to facilitate inferences about its target necessary for
scientific representation? Is it sufficient?
12. “Whether a scientific claim is a law depends on the agents who use it.” Discuss.
13. How, if at all, are laws and regularities related?
14. “The probability of rolling a 2 on a fair die is 1/6.” What does this statement
mean?
15. What is the base-rate fallacy? What is its philosophical significance?
END O