These practice questions are a great way to help you engage with the phrasing of a question and identify clues to the answer. The questions will ask you to analyse a statement to identify what concepts are represented within.
Before showing you the answer, this quiz will highlight the sections in the question that are most useful for finding the answer.
For a full explanation of how these questions work and why they are useful, click here.
Question 1
My thesis is that we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material of the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff “pure experience,” then knowing can be easily explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.
- Materialism
- Idealism
- Determinism
- Substance
- Holism
- Monism
- Ontology
- Reductionism
- Dualism
Click to reveal the key clues in the question
- “only one primal stuff”
- “of which everything is composed”
- “pure experience”
Click to find out the answer.
- Substance
- Monism
- Ontology
Click to understand why.
Let me first deal with pure experience. The idea of experience does suggest some sort of mental process which might lead to the notion that all is mind but the “stuff” is neither matter nor mind and pure experience is just what it is being called. Admittedly, you do not have enough information to make a sure judgment.
Ontology is involved since it is a question of what exists, monism because there is but one type of stuff and substance since everything else if composed of it.
Source: James, W. (1904). Does consciousness exist? Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 1, 477‒491.
Question 2
This one is about motivation and the difference between childhood motives and adult motives.
Functional autonomy regards adult motives as varied, and as self-sustaining, contemporary systems, growing out of antecedent systems, but functionally independent of them.
- Holism
- Reductionism
- Elementalism
- Dualism
- Monism
- Biological determinism
- Emergence
- Transcendence
- Determinism
Click to reveal the key clues in the question.
- “adult motives”
- “contemporary”
- “growing out of”
- “functionally independent”
Click to find out the answer.
Click to understand why.
This is dealing with the fact that, with experiences in the world, people pass from purely biological beings to conscious, self-determining and with interests and purposes that are acquired and may be directed well into the future rather than immediate phenomena as are instincts. So we are dealing with emergent phenomena.
From Ewen, R. B. (1988). An introduction to theories of personality (3rd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Question 3
Isolating two interrelated parts of a whole, from each other, parts that need each other, parts that are truly “parts” and not wholes, distorts them both, sickens and contaminates them . . . Ultimately, it even makes them non-viable.
- Reductionism
- Emergence
- Materialism
- Idealism
- Holism
- Mechanism
- Determinism
- Ontology
Click to reveal the key clues in the question
- “isolating”
- “interrelated parts”
- “parts that need each other”
Click to find out the answer.
Click to understand why.
This is an argument against reductionism, of taking an organized whole and explaining it terms of subcomponents. It is an argument in favor of holism.
Source. Maslow, A. H. (1964). Religions, values, and peak-experiences. New York: Penguin Books.
Question 4
. . . mental events, states and processes are identical with neuropsychological events in the brain, and the property of being in a certain mental state . . . is identical with the property of being in a certain neurophysiological state.
- Reductionism
- Emergence
- Materialism
- Idealism
- Holism
- Mechanism
- Determinism
- Ontology
Click to reveal the key clues in the question.
- “mental events”
- “identical”
- “events in the brain”
Click to find out the answer.
Click to understand why.
If mental states are identical with brain states, they are brain states and the mind has become biological. Since the brain is composed of matter it is materialism.
Source: Fodor, J. A. (1981). The mind‒body problem. Scientific American, 244, 114‒123.
