Take Home Exam (Short Answer Questions)

5. A category mistake occurs when we think that something for which we

have a concept has to exist alongside a group of its parts, instead of recognizing the
possibility that it may exist as a combination of all those parts together. An example
would be a person A showing a person B a piano, where A is hitting some of the
keys to show how the instrument works. If person B did not have a good
understanding of what a piano was, he might think that the hitting of the keys was
interesting, but wonder which key exactly was the piano. He might ask person A,
who would then have to explain that the piano was not found in any individual key,
but was rather the collective of all the keys and any mechanisms that produced or
altered the sound of the instrument. In this instance, we see the concept of the
piano was misunderstood to exist among the keys, because B misattributed the
category of being a piano to being a key instead of being a collection of keys.
Thus, a piano was thought of as being wholly contained in what was actually simply
a part of a piano, instead of being understood as the whole of the instrument.

6.

7. Supervenience is the idea that a change in some X cannot occur without a

change in some Y. In this case it is said that X supervenes on Y. It is important to
note that this is not the same as an identity relationship, as it is possible for Y to
have a change without a subsequent change in X. To make this clearer, we will use
the example of a song. A song could be said to supervene on the notes within it. If
two songs had all of the exact same notes, then it would seem incorrect to call it a
different song (to make this simpler, we will assume that the song has no lyrics, so
that we dont have to deal with the possibility of the song supervening on both the
lyrics and the musical notes at the same time). However, if the notes were to
change, then you could possibly be listening to a different song. This shows how a
song cannot change without the notes that make it changing, but now we must
examine my second claim: that the notes can change while the song remains the
same. For this to be true, I would like to add the idea that songs are conceptual in
nature, a concept being something like a table in the abstract, which could have
many different variations. I will argue that a particular song could also have
different variations. There can be a live version of a song with an added solo, or
maybe a mistake made. This obviously constitutes a change in the notes of the
song; however it seems a bit extreme to conclude that this is a new song. Most of
the song seems to be similar enough to its original that we may be tempted to say
that it is more likely a different version of the same song, just as we can have
different versions of table made of different types of wood. In this way, a change in
the notes is not sufficient for a new song to be formed, but it is necessary for a new
song to be created.
 8. Substance dualism argues that there are two separate substances which
make up the material and the mental. The material substance would likely have
certain characteristics which would not be shared with the mental substance, such
as extension in space. Likewise, the mental substance would be the type of thing
that could possibly give rise to something like thought or consciousness, while the
material presumably could not. This runs contrary to the ideas of property dualism,
which would instead argue that there might just be once substance that is the type
of thing that could give rise to mental processes and also have things like extension.
Under this view, the physical can instantiate different properties, but the mental
properties are still distinct from the physical properties, meaning that the mental
still cant be simplified to only physical things. Under this view, it isnt entirely clear
how the material substance can allow for the mental and physical properties could
interact or give rise to both, but it avoids some problems, such as the issue of what
the nature of mental