Sample midterm exam

The questions in section A are to be answered in a single paragraph. Section B will require about four paragraphs. Adequate space will be provided on the exam paper. The exam is in-class and closed-book.

PHIL/PSYCH 256, MID-TERM EXAM
Winter, 1995

Name:
ID #:

A. Answer each of the following 7 questions (5 marks each).

1. What is the proposed analogy between thinking and computing?
2. What psychological experiments cast doubt on the psychological plausibility of formal logic as a model of mind?
3. What areas of knowledge are most plausibly described in terms of rules, and in what areas of knowledge are rules hardest to apply?
4. Do concepts have exact definitions in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions? If not, what is their structure?
5. What does thinking of knowledge in terms of rules, concepts, and analogies suggest about the nature of effective teaching?
6. What are the main stages in analogical thinking? What constraints figure most prominently at each of those stages?
7. What approach to mental representation so far discussed tells us most about the nature of language?

B. Write a short essay on the following topic (15 marks):

How do people choose what clothes they will put on in the morning? Discuss this important kind of problem solving in terms of logic, rules, concepts, and analogies, critically assessing the usefulness of each representational-computational approach. What aspects of knowledge about clothes are not well captured by these kinds of mental representation?