Quiz Reviews

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Reviews of the weekly quizzes…

Below are the basic elements in a good answer. Full credit requires that your answers are explained in your own clear, down-to-earth language. If the language in the lectures or readings is helpful, you can use some of it, but you will lose points if you borrow from sources outside the class. I want to see how you understand and interact with these ideas, not software or the internet.

Use these reviews to make corrections/clarifications to your reading questions answers. This will help with your exams.

• This topic was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by jsalbato@cnm.edu.
• This topic was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by jsalbato@cnm.edu.
• This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by jsalbato@cnm.edu.
• This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by jsalbato@cnm.edu.
• This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by jsalbato@cnm.edu.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #1
1. The tasks for each week are listed at the top of our webpage: (1) Do the reading while (2) answering the Reading Questions, then (3) use the lectures to get further clarity for your answers, then (4) take the Friday Quiz.
2. The absolute deadline for quizzes and exams is Saturday at noon.
3. The best prep for the Friday quizzes is the Reading Questions, because most of the quiz comes straight from those questions. (Note: But please be sure to read the questions carefully, because there are some subtle differences from the reading questions that I want you to think about. You can paste some of your reading questions answers straight over, but this won’t work for all of the quiz questions.)
4. The Friday quizzes cannot be made up, but there are many extra points built into the class to make up for missing a quiz or two. (The extra points are included in every quiz; these are not extra credit assignments.)
5. Grades are based on earning points. For example, a “B” is earned when you get 80 points. (Note: It is not a percentage; that’s much harder.)
6. If your quizzes or final exam include content that is not your own work, such as content from a search, AI, or a website, that question will receive a zero and be counted as plagiarism. Please don’t do this, because plagiarism is cheating and has to be reported to the Dean of Students.
7. Philosophy is the study of the presuppositions in all fields of thought. (Note: Philosophy is the home of genuine critical thinking, carefully checking the support for all of our ideas, even the ones that we assume and seem obvious.)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #2
1. My belief is only true if it agrees with reality. (“Evidence” or “proof” are not accurate answers, because, sadly, we might have mistaken evidence, like those who see the sunset as evidence that the sun revolved around the earth. It is reality that makes a claim true, not the evidence.)
2. The idea of “personal truth” or some belief being “true to me” is saying no more than “I believe this” or “This is my perspective”. And, of course, your believing something has no bearing on whether it agrees with reality. People believe false things and are deceived by their limited perspective constantly.
3. We should judge others’ values when they are irrational and when they could harm others. This can be done fairly by judging others’ values based on their own consistency, that is, we can judge someone’s values as being irrational if they are inconsistent with reality or the author’s own values.
4. Jeff immediately grows a beard (I am so ashamed of my immaturity), and you mock him and threaten to kill him when he tried to encourage you to escape the cave.
5. The Cave story mocks the “seeing is believing” mindset, because it shows the cave-dwellers (most people) staring at illusions and taking them for reality. If all you see is deception, then your beliefs will be delusions. And, in Plato’s view, the whole physical world of sight is deceptive.
6. Normal science studies things in the physical world. In the cave story, these would be the shadows, and thus science, to Plato, is just playing the “shadow game” of naming and predicting the shadows.
7. Our everyday, physical world is untrustworthy for three reasons (pick two): 1. The world is always changing, 2. Our perspectives are always changing, and 3. The theories we use to interpret the world are always changing. (But, note, that doesn’t mean that objective truth doesn’t exist, it just isn’t unchanging. Unchanging truth is found in the realm of ideals, like math and philosophy.)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #3
1. Dasein is the human being. Dasein is special, because it is a being whose Being is an issues for it. In other words, Dasein is unique in that it is thrown into the world without knowing what it “is” while also being concerned about when it will no longer “be” (death).
2. The pen in use is Ready-to-hand, which means that it must fade into the background of the task it is being used for. In order to pay attention to the in-order-to tasks (the writing), we must take the pen for granted.
3. If my pen stopped working, it may become Present-at-hand, which means that it becomes a problem that I must study objectively to repair it or reevaluate the project it is being used for.
4. If math or my job is directly related to my life goals (I want to be a mathematician or stay in this career) , then to concentrate on my current task I have to let those goals fade into the background of my thoughts. This can be bad, because I might lose sight of those goals. For most people, however, math class and their job are not connected to their goals and those goals do not appear at all (they are no-thing) except when daydreaming. This is really bad because you are likely to continue at these irrelevant tasks and never reach anything you seek.
5. Present-at-hand is how broken or missing tools appear. They must be studied objectively to repair them back to the ready-to-hand. Very rarely these present-at-hand experiences can lead to seeing what the tool and projects are for and allow you to evaluate the value of the project.
6. If death became truly present-at-hand this would mean we are studying death objectively and realizing that all of our projects are ending (breaking), and this, if Jeff’s hopes are realized, would allow us to study all of the projects behind our everyday tasks and evaluate them to assess their worth. “Since I am dying (we all are, by the way), do I really care about these projects? Wait, I am not even working toward any of the goals that matter. Damn it! Please help me Jeff.” (Or, you know, something like that.)
7. The They says, “Sure, death will happen to you, but not soon, so don’t think about it. You have plenty of time to take control of your life someday. For now, just keep working at the Krusty Krab to buy another companion cube.” (Note: Krusty Krab = your job/school; companion cube = your phone)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #4
1. Garcin cannot leave because Estelle and Inez aren’t accepting his social identity as a “tough guy” and so he must convince them or he can’t believe it himself. We are desperate for people to recognize us as what we think we are.
2. Estelle needs her mirror, because a mirror is how superficial people try to control how other people see them, and so without it her identity is up for grabs.
3. We spend a ton of effort altering our looks and buying things to get other people to accept us as the person we want to be (and this person is often a lie). The car, clothes, gadgets are tools for our social performance that is trying to get people to see us as the social identity we are trying to portray. And even if you aren’t purely superficial, we all still try to control the “self” we portray to others, whether it is Jeff’s “I’m a kind, nerdy dad that is not obsessed with my image” or your “I desperately want people to see me as a rebel who doesn’t care what they think.” (Wicked irony, eh?)
4. The core lesson of “No Exit” is that our need to forge a social identity and be recognized as that by other people is the cause of a ton of our desperation, insecurity, and self-deception.
5. Bad Faith is a fully conscious and intentional lie to oneself. In this lie we either deny our facts or deny that we can transcend those facts in our actions and values. Most importantly, we use these Bad Faith lies to avoid current choices and deny responsibility for our past choices.
6. The waiter doesn’t “have to” do any of this. What we choose is a choice to value that thing, and he won’t admit that he is choosing tips over being himself or doing something else for money. He makes the choice to act like a robot for tips instead of choosing to be himself, value authenticity over money, get another job, be nice because it makes others happy, etc.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #5
1. Our list is: love/companionship, self-expression/creativity, acceptance/recognition, and purpose/achievement. (Synonyms are fine.)(And, of course, there are also our baseline physiological and negative/security needs.)
2. A neurosis is a failure in the Reality Principle. In other words, it is a behavior that shows an inability to accept reality in seeking to meet your needs. I am out of touch with reality if I think the shoes I bought express my genuine thoughts and feelings and not just my copying others to gain acceptance for a fake version of myself. The designer of the shoes is expressing her actual self; I’m not. I’m only gaining acceptance for my ability to have enough money to obey a trend and/or copy others as a fake self.
3. If our physiological needs are unmet, like our need for food, we die. If you psychological needs are unmet, we die psychologically, that is, we will go insane.
4. If our psychological needs are only partially met for long period we begin to psychologically deteriorate and will usually develop neurotic traits to try to artificially cope with these needs being unmet.
5. Fromm rejects the Sociological Relativist conception of sanity that says a person is sane if they “fit in” in their given society, no matter how insane that society might be.
6. From defines sanity in a universal and objective way. A person who rationally seeks and meets their real needs is sane.
7. Selfishness is a defect in that it will lead to difficulties in meeting our real needs (like love), and it is socially patterned in that this is a common, and even encouraged, behavior in our society. (And so the selfish person has a hard time seeing their defect, because they see many others being selfish and being applauded for it…like being elected president…zing!)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #6
1. The working classes produces all of our tangible products that we need to live our daily lives…food, clothing, cars, house, technology, etc. The more products you produce and the more sophisticated those products are, the less you are worth by comparison. Think of the Chinese workers making incredibly expensive iphones. The upper classes do not produce anything. They manage or own production.
2. Product alienation is caused by the product never being yours but the owners, and it reflects only their choices.
3. Activity alienation stems from your choices and actions being dictated by the owners, so you should have many examples of your actions and even words being dictated by a manager or teacher.
4. Activity alienation robs the worker of expression, and the result of this inability to meet your need for free, self-expression and creativity are mental exhaustion, deep boredom, aggression, neurotic means of expression, etc.
5. Georg avoided product alienation because his products belonged to him and reflected his choices and skills. He avoided activity alienation because his time and actions were not dictated but the result of his own choices and skills.
6. Marx says that our social self is a result of how we are situated as workers. The socio-economic situation as well as the way the work is organized will dictate our key beliefs, values, and social identity, such as whether humans are good or bad, what people we relate to, our goals, what political ideologies we will support, etc. (Tangent: Notice that this means that the organization of society will be a major cause of what type of society we think is possible and how our motivations and goals play out. So, of course, if you are working in a thoroughly capitalist sector of the economy, you will think that no other model is possible because humans are selfish, work is miserable, etc.)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #7:
1. The Marcuse piece is mainly about real versus false/artificial needs.
2. Herbert comes back for several reasons: first, the world out there is no longer conducive to meeting his real needs, second, he does not know how to seek and meet his real needs, and, third, he is so conditioned to accept artificial needs that he finds them sort of satisfying. (Note: Of course, most of the time his bad faith (collar) will keep him from even trying to escape to seek his real needs.)
3. The key steps in the cycle are: You work a job that is alienating, so your real needs are frustrated. You “treat yourself” to some expensive artificial need because you worked so hard. These needs are not actually fulfilling of your real needs for your real self, so they must be constantly replaced and cause you to go into debt. You overwork at your alienating job just to make as much money as you can to afford them. This increases your alienation which makes your dissatisfaction even worse. So you buy even more false needs to compensate for your alienated and dissatisfying life. Work, frustration, false needs, frustration, debt, overwork, repeat…
4. Our alienation is hidden from us for four reasons (provide two): 1. We are too busy to do anything about it, because we are in the spiral of alienation and false needs, 2. We are convinced society is fair and equal because everyone has the same false needs, so we must all be rich, 3. We have no one to blame, because everyone is just playing their replaceable roles in the system that we support, 4. Our minds contain only images, which we means we lack the concepts and ideals that would allow us to challenge the status quo with a better way it could be.
5. You believe Apple, because the ads and social effects of the brand is like hypnosis, with no real evidence given to support why you should agree with them. Then, you act and feel on the belief by buying the phone and feeling joy that you are now rad, too. Finally, you repeat or make up total lies to try to make sense of your totally irrational belief and actions. (Your real reasons are something like, “People will see that I have the same overpriced phone as millions of people and think I fit in and am rich,” but you will tell yourself “It has a great camera, my old phone is uncool, and I’m an Apple person.”)
6. “Marketing Orientation” explains how we value ourselves as if we are products to be bought, so we go to the gym because we think if we improve our looks we will be worth more in other’s eyes and so we’ll feel better about ourselves as shiny products to be sold on a shelf.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #8
1. The basic rule of Stoicism is to concern yourself only with things you can control.
2. For beginners, the first step is to get rid of all desires, because all that a beginner desires are things they can’t control, so they must first repress all desires until desires in their control can be found.
3. In our control are: our opinion (our beliefs, judgments, values), our pursuit (our goals (but attaining them is out of our control)), our desires (what we like and feel), our aversions (our fears, dislikes, anger), and our own actions.
4. Our health is out of our control because we cannot prevent death or illness in any full sense. Eating well and taking care of myself will not prevent me from getting all sorts of cancers and diseases, being born with genetic disorders, and it surely won’t stop me from being murdered.
5. d. a cup
6. First, they would remind themselves that they cannot control how the teacher grades their work nor how grades are determined in the class. Then, they would reflect on what they can control and realize whether they did their best on the assignment…if they did, then they would be fine, knowing they did their best at what they can control… and if they didn’t do their best, then they would also be fine, because they deserved the “F” and so it all makes perfect sense.
7. Providence (or God, fate, nature, etc,) must be trusted to be in control of all of the things that we cannot control.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #9
1. Selfishness is a special brand of self-interest wherein the person would harm others to benefit themselves, whereas self-interest is neutral. Self-interest is perfectly consistent with being kind to others, caring for your society, etc.
2. Our moral judgments of others do (and should) consider a complex psychology. We consider not only the action and its consequences but also the character of the person and their intentions.
3. Plato (Glaucon) implies that the ring shows us what our inner self would really do if it were not constrained by fear of punishment (but there is a good case to be made that this ring only reveals what a frustrated and envious person in a competitive and unfair society would do with the ring. It is hard to imagine that these would be the goals of the innate or natural self).
4. It could be argued that the shepherd’s actions reveal his resentment for his social situation in a hierarchical society and not an innate desire for aggression and power. Why would a pastoralist want to rule a kingdom and not just have more leisure? Would a hunter-gatherer have these same ambitions? (Call me immature, but if I were a hunter-gatherer, I would use the ring to hunt more easily and use my hunting prowess to impress the scantily-clad women…oh, wait, why would they be scantily-clad?)
5. Hobbes says that the fact that so many of us lock our doors, lock up our wealth, and own guns for protection seems to show that we agree with Hobbes when he says humanity is selfish and cruel.
6. Hobbes is exaggerating, because we are not locking our doors because we fear all of humanity. We lock our doors out of fear of a small minority of people who are either mentally unhinged or socially desperate.
7. The only way to have a peaceful society, for both Plato and Hobbes, is FEAR, fear of the government, police, prisons, punishment, etc.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #10
1. Unless there was a situation of scarcity, the Savage would not care and simply find fruit at another tree, because she has no conception of property.
2. The Savage mind sees someone suffering and naturally identifies with the sufferer and feels their pain. Thus, they are moved to help the sufferer to relieve their own feelings of pain.
3. The civilized person cover their ears and talks themselves out of naturally identifying with the person’s suffering, so that they could rationalize not getting involved. They probably told themselves something like, “It could be a trap like I heard about on the news,” “The victim probably deserves it,” etc.
4. The ethic of Taker culture is that the earth is theirs, so they can do with it what they please. And anyone who is not advanced enough to be part of the Taker culture can be treated like another animal, used by us for our lofty, Taker goals, like giving them alienated lives by force.
5. According to Smith, we seek after luxury because, in capitalism, we use our natural sympathy to imagine not how other people feel but how they view us. Because we do not want them to pity us, we must portray to the world that we are richer, healthier, and happier than we really are…car, iphone, shoes, etc.
6. The young man with (the curse of) ambition is embarrassed by his simple life, and so decided to compete with others his whole career. He serves people he hates and kisses the butts (this is what “obsequious” means) of his despised superiors. In the end, even if he succeeds, he realizes that he wasted his life in these pursuits and would have been happier to stay with his former, simple life. (And, yes, this is the godfather of capitalism saying that capitalism sucks for the workers but is good for the economy.)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #11
1. Anderson said he was not responsible for the deaths because (pick two): a. He didn’t directly kill anyone or order killing, b. He was just following orders, c. He was just trying to do his job to the best of his abilities, d. The laws agreed with him, e. “Good society” approved his efforts, f. He was following in the footsteps of a great, successful man.
2. His actual motives were a combination of seeking success, doing his “ethical” duty, and, most of all, to be appreciated for doing a good job. And, yes, if you are a decent person, these are likely your same motivations.
3. When the lab is moved to a store front – with no reference to Yale – this reduction in the perceived legitimacy of the authority figure giving the orders leads to a drop in obedience from 65% to 48%. This gives Jeff hope because even though humans are mostly mindless in an obedience situation, they are at least critical of the authority figure.
4. In variation #11, the vast majority of teachers stopped extremely early, long before the learner protested at all. In fact, most of them stopped on or before 60 volts. This mean that humans avoid harming others when they feel they have a choice in the matter.
5. In variation #14, the “teachers” are perfectly obedient when the authority, who is now in the learning role, tells them to stop. Having the authority figure tell you what you already want to do – stop hurting people – makes obedience easy.
6. The two best – and probably overlapping – explanations are: 1) The actor that quit provided them a successful example of doing what they wanted to do but didn’t think was possible (because in obedience you don’t think you have choices) and wasn’t punished for it. 2) With the actor quitting now there is conflict between obedience and conformity, that is, the subject wants to please the authority but also wants to “fit in” with his peers, and now the subject would feel like a psychopath in front of a decent person who quit harming the learner.
7. In variation #18 obedience climbed all the way to 93% because of the introduction of peers who obeyed the authority, so, in a group setting, the vast majority would obey orders to kill because the orders are combined with the powerful forces of group conformity and social expectations. Yes, these are why people in religious or military groups will carry out atrocious things if the group commands it.

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