Deck 4: Essentialism and Reductionism: Enemies or Friends?

Question 1

Classical essentialism is best exemplified by ___________ notion that things have attributes that are necessary, unalterable, and indispensible.

A) Plato's
B) Aristotle's
C) Kant's
D) Darwin's

Answer 1

B

Question 2

A non-essential property that a subject may not have or lose without changing its nature is a __________ property.

A) per se
B) per opta
C) per accidens
D) per neces

Answer 2

C

Question 3

What could be an example of an essential property of a human female?

A) ability to give birth
B) sexual organs
C) small-framed build
D) an XX karyotype

Answer 3

D

Question 4

Categorization is the search for common properties, which __________ diversity.

A) facilitates
B) defines
C) disavows
D) presupposes

Question 5

According to the text, neo-essentialism is not the straightjacket of Plato's _______________ essentialism, or even Aristotle's ____________ essentialism.

A) natural, classical
B) natural, transcendental
C) transcendental, natural
D) classical, transcendental

Question 6

____________ is the process of taking causal explanations from higher, fuzzier levels, to deeper, more precise levels.

A) Constructionism
B) Reductionism
C) Origin essentialism
D) Anti-essentialism

Question 7

The reductionist goal of _______________ is intimately tied to the determinist goal of __________.

A) explanation, prediction
B) prediction, explanation
C) explanation, evaluation
D) simplification, explanation

Question 8

___________ describes the relationship between a young and insecure science and its adjacent older science.

A) Reductionism
B) Shared empiricism
C) Antidiscipline
D) Inverse empiricism

Question 9

According to Peterson (1997), most contemporary ______________ prefer to regard people as biopsychosocial beings, believing that people and their behavior are best explained in terms of relevant biological mechanisms, psychological processes, and social influences.

A) biologists
B) psychologists
C) sociologists
D) philosophers

Question 10

_______________ means that higher-level phenomena can be fully explained by lower-level properties, and that the higher-level properties have no causal impact independent of their parts.

A) Holistic reductionism
B) Empirical reductionism
C) Casual reductionism
D) Eliminative reductionism

Question 11

__________ is a series of self-organizing processes that produce qualitative "novelties" that cannot be fully expressed as the sums of the quantitative propertied of the constituent parts.

A) Antireductionism
B) Contingency
C) Emergence
D) Totality

Question 12

According to the text, ___________ has made its greatest strides when it has picked apart wholes to examine the parts, and in doing so has gained a better understanding of the wholes they constitute.

A) science
B) reductionism
C) philosophy
D) sociology

Question 13

Essentialism does not claim that all members of a class of people are identical, only that they share the same essential properties that mark them as one thing rather than another.

Question 14

All criminological theories that have evolved under sociology's wing are reductionist from a sociological point of view because they appeal to individuals, their natures, and their motivations.

Question 15

The philosophical concepts most often used pejoratively by social scientists are most probably social constructionism and reductionism.