PSYC 3100-01 SPRING 2019
FINAL EXAM: MONDAY 5/6/19, 1:00pm-3:00pm, GENT 131
REVIEW SESSION: FRIDAY 5/3/19, 3:00-4:30pm, BOUS A-106

Expect 35-40 multiple choice questions, which you will have the full exam block to complete.

The post-midterm reading for the final exam consists of the syllabus readings from Hergenhahn starting with Turing and Searle and philosophy of science (which therefore includes a bit of pre-midterm material); the Greek philosophers and related topics, along with related references to Freud and to the Neobehaviorists; treated lightly from the reading will be the Scientific Revolution (i.e. the tradition of Augustine and Aquinas being overthrown by Galileo and Newton); and Modern Epistemology, i.e., Descartes through Kant, as indicated on the syllabus and the epistemology web page (see below). The early Positivists (Occam, Bacon, Comte, Mach) on the Logical Positivism web page will not be covered, though Hume and Skinner (as addressed in class and on the web page) will be, and Logical Positivism, Popper, and Kuhn are still fair game. Nothing about Mental Testing or Psychoanalysis (beyond my references to Freud in other contexts) is covered. Also note the PowerPoint slides and web pages on Epistemology and Positivism (linked below).

The final exam is mostly focused on material since the last exam, and includes all the material covered on the second quiz. Some portions of the material are necessarily cumulative -- for example: Hume's influence on connectionism was addressed early in the semester; Descartes's dualism was covered in the context of the mind-body problem; the topic of Logical Positivism first appeared with the philosophy of science material that went into Popper and Kuhn. For the final you should understand what Popper and Kuhn said and their terminology, emphasizing Kuhn's model of change in science. We revisit the Logical Positivism web page to note David Hume's influence on those ideas and to link him to other thinkers (Newton, Skinner) as well as to show the explicit debt owed to him by 20th century Logical Positivism (in the text excerpt at the bottom of that page).

The three ways I suggest Hume was influential in psychology are:

1. Hume said simple ideas could be built up into complex ideas through some simple laws of association, instead of depending on the mind playing an active role with its unexplained homunculus abilities. PDP models of information processing are based on applying a few generic rules to a large collection of simple processing units instead of depending on a program that executes an explicit set of instructions.
2. Hume said all knowledge could be reduced to either matters of fact or observation (synthetic statements) or matters of the relations among ideas (analytic statements), and anything else didn't count as knowledge at all. Logical positivism was the philosophy of science in the 20th century that took that as its starting point and said science was the model for all knowledge; it was the most influential philosophy underlying behaviorism, affecting the kinds of theories that were developed and favoring the neglect of any role for the mind.
3. Hume said that cause and effect couldn't be perceived with the senses and were merely the result of observing repeated contiguity between successive events, along with the unjustifiable assumption that the future will be like the past; therefore the best attitude toward science would be to stick to cataloging the observations and their typical sequences without proposing any underlying causal explanations of why things happen. The most influential behaviorist, B.F. Skinner, adopted much the same attitude by arguing against complicated theorizing in terms of physiology or cognition or other unobservable variables, and instead just cataloging the observed relationships between stimuli, responses, and reinforcements and punishments.

Priorities for studying should be (1) topics that were discussed in class AND appear in the reading, (2) topics that were discussed in class but do NOT appear in the reading, (3) topics that appear in the reading but were NOT discussed in class, in which case I will explicitly point out exactly which topics I mean, if any. The major focus of the exam is on things I say in class, but you should use the text to enrich and enlarge your understanding of anything covered in lecture.

Topics not addressed in lecture that you are responsible for from the text:

• The reading on Early Greek Medicine pp. 38-41 was not explicitly covered in lecture but was referred to in the context of Empedocles's four elements being connected to the four humors in the body, and then to the four personality types described in that section. So the part you're responsible for is summarized in this table from the textbook, modified to include those four elements: Galen Temperaments from Hippocrates Humors from Empedocles Elements.jpg (or see pdf version of the same image).
• Though the epistemologists (Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant) are discussed briefly in the recorded lecture (link also appears below), the assigned reading covers them more. At the same time, as indicated in class, the web page and PowerPoint slides highlight as much as you really need to know of them for this exam, so the required text reading can be narrowed and focused quite a bit to reflect just those highlighted points. Material on these philosophers in the textbook reading that is NOT COVERED in the Epistemology web page and slides will NOT BE COVERED on the exam.

 

TURING AND SEARLE (BUT NOT THE REST OF THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM)

* CH.20 pp. 628-630

7th edition:

* CH.19 pp. 595-597

8th edition:

* CH.19 pp. 584-586

 

PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

[see these slides]

* CH.1 pp. 7-14 "What Is Science" [see this link], Logical Positivism [see this link and this diagram], Popper, and Kuhn [see this diagram]; pp. 14-17 determinism

7th edition:

* CH.1 pp. 6-13 "What Is Science", Logical Positivism, Popper, and Kuhn; pp. 13-16 determinism

8th edition:

* CH.1 pp. 6-12 "What Is Science", Logical Positivism, Popper, and Kuhn; ; pp. 13-15 determinism

 

FOUNDATIONS OF ONTOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY IN EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY
* CH.2: pp. 29-38 on Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus; pp. 38-41 on Early Greek Medicine; pp. 41-60 on the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
7th edition:
* CH.2: pp. 29-36 on Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus; pp. 36-38 on Early Greek Medicine; pp. 39-56 on the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
8th edition:

* CH.2: pp. 29-36 on Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus; pp. 36-39 on Early Greek Medicine; pp. 39-57 on the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

* Freud and Plato: pp. 531-532 on id, ego, and superego; pp. 527-528 and 534-536 on the Oedipus Complex and its resolution in the "phallic stage" of psychosexual development
7th edition:
* Freud and Plato: pp. 504-505 on id, ego, and superego; pp. 501-502 and 507-508 on the Oedipus Complex and its resolution in the "phallic stage" of psychosexual development
8th edition:

* Freud and Plato: pp. 495-496 on id, ego, and superego; pp. 492-493 and 498-499 on the Oedipus Complex and its resolution in the "phallic stage" of psychosexual development

* Mapping Aristotle's Four Causes onto behaviorist theories of learning: Lashley and material cause, p. 607 (mass action and equipotentiality); Hull and efficient cause, pp. 435-437 (esp. "Reaction Potential"); Tolman and formal cause, pp. 430-431; Skinner and final cause, p. 445 (section on "Operant Behavior") and p. 448 (section on "Skinner's Attitude Toward Theory")
7th edition:
* Mapping Aristotle's Four Causes onto behaviorist theories of learning: Lashley and material cause, p. 568-569 (mass action and equipotentiality); Hull and efficient cause, pp. 413-415 (esp. "Reaction Potential"); Tolman and formal cause, pp. 427-428; Skinner and final cause, p. 420 (section on "Operant Behavior") and p. 422-423 (section on "Skinner's Attitude Toward Theory")
8th edition:

* Mapping Aristotle's Four Causes onto behaviorist theories of learning: Lashley and material cause, pp. 557-558 (mass action and equipotentiality); Hull and efficient cause, pp. 405-407 (esp. "Reaction Potential"); Tolman and formal cause, pp. 419-420; Skinner and final cause, pp. 411-412 (section on "Operant Behavior") and pp. 414-415 (section on "Skinner's Attitude Toward Theory")

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
* Augustine pp. 78-79 (stop before "the Will")
* Scholasticism p. 86
* Thomas Aquinas pp. 89-91
* Galileo pp. 108-112
* Newton pp. 112-114
7th edition:
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
* Augustine pp. 74-75 (stop before "the Will")
* Scholasticism p. 81
* Thomas Aquinas pp. 84-85
* Galileo pp. 102-105
* Newton pp. 105-107
8th edition:

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

* Augustine pp. 73-74 (stop before "the Will")

* Scholasticism pp. 80-81

* Thomas Aquinas pp. 83-85

* Galileo pp. 101-104

* Newton pp. 104-106

FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN EPISTEMOLOGY
* Descartes pp. 117-124
* John Locke pp. 134-140
* George Berkeley pp. 140-143
* David Hume pp. 143-150
* Immanuel Kant pp. 192-196
* Platonic and Aristotelian themes in psychology [Epistemology web page]
7th edition:
FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN EPISTEMOLOGY
* Descartes pp. 111-117
* John Locke pp. 126-131
* George Berkeley pp. 131-134
* David Hume pp. 134-140
* Immanuel Kant pp. 180-185
* Platonic and Aristotelian themes in psychology [Epistemology web page]

8th edition:

FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN EPISTEMOLOGY

* Descartes pp. 110-116

* John Locke pp. 124-128

* George Berkeley pp. 129-132

* David Hume pp. 132-138

* Immanuel Kant pp. 176-181

* Platonic and Aristotelian themes in psychology [Epistemology web page]

 

Web page links to read:

• PowerPoint slides on Philosophy of Science in text format. On the Final Exam, logical positivism is fair game again and Popper and Kuhn will be emphasized, rather than the Stanovich reading that we covered before the Midterm (though the Stanovich material could still be referenced).
• Outline of Logical Positivism: This is a very brief sketch of the philosophy of science known as Logical Positivism, which was very influential in the development of psychology in the first half of the 20th century. Note the concluding segment, an excerpt from the first English-language manifesto of logical positivism, in which Hume's influence is explicitly acknowledged. The diagram of the logical positivist view of science may be useful to note here as well.
• Diagram of Kuhn's view of revolutionary change in science from Leahey's History Of Psychology.
• PowerPoint slides from Thales to Democritus in text format.
• PowerPoint slides from the Sophists to Aristotle in text format.
• Socrates is portrayed here in an excerpt from Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter by Thomas Cahill. In just a few fun pages you get a character sketch, an example of his method of questioning (and why it was annoying), some mention of the nature of Plato's rendering of Socrates, and a note on his appeal to early Christianity due to the similiarities between him and Jesus.
• Examples of Plato's idealism in psychology as described in class.
• PowerPoint slides on epistemology: These are fairly redundant with the Epistemology web page that summarizes them. The web page version, though, may be a useful reference for some of the "useful technical terms" (which will NOT be on the exam) that come up in the lecture and reading, as well as for the timeline along the top, though these are strictly optional just in case they help with understanding the five summaries of the relevant thinkers (Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant). NOTE: the "Rationalism vs. Empiricism" section lists five questions that distinguish the two approaches, and the last three of those are not specifically intended for PSYC 3100 -- so if you find them mystifying you can ignore them.
• Recording of brief lecture on epistemology to supplement readings on Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant