Multiple Choice Exam

Karel Lambert and Gordon Britten, "Laws and Conditional Statements"

Please use a form 882-ES Scan-Tron Card to record your answers. Choose the best answer to each of the following questions.

1. Lambert's and Britten's analysis of the concept of law focuses on the question of whether:

• A. laws are statements or what statements express
• B. laws are statements which express regularities
• C. laws are generalizations
• D. laws are statements of universal form
• E. none of the above

2. Lambert and Britten restrict their analysis of the concept of law to cases where laws:

• A. are true
• B. are statistical generalizations
• C. of the form "For all x, if x is F, then x is G"
• D. all of the above
• E. none of the above

3. According to Lambert and Britten, the criterion that laws have "empirical content" is intended to:

• A. rule out analytic statements as laws
• B. rule out nonsensical statements as laws
• C. restrict laws to synthetic statements
• D. all of the above
• E. none of the above

4. According to Lambert and Britten, the notion of empirical content:

• A. is fairly easy to state precisely
• B. is unclear
• C. is trivial
• D. is unimportant in discussions about laws
• E. none of the above

5. According to Lambert and Britten, the criterion that a statement which expresses a law must be true:

• A. is unproblematic
• B. is a necessary requirement
• C. is a sufficient requirement
• D. is best left open for further discussion
• E. none of the above

6. According to Lambert and Britten, the most important criterion for determining whether a statement is a lawlike is its:

• A. support of counterfactual conditionals
• B. empirical content
• C. truth
• D. universality
• E. none of the above

7. According to Lambert and Britten, universal statements which support counterfactual conditionals differ from accidental generalizations in that they are:

• A. unrestricted in their scope
• B. about what in fact happens to be the case
• C. equivalent to a finite conjunction of statements
• D. all of the above
• E. none of the above

8. According to Lambert and Britten, counterfactual conditionals are:

• A. "material" conditionals
• B. always true, since their antecedents are always false
• C. like enthymematic arguments in which what is unstated is the law which supports them
• D. all of the above
• E. none of the above.

9. According to Lambert and Britten, laws "support" counterfactual conditionals in the sense that:

• A. they are "intuitively connected
• B. they are "necessarily" connected
• C. from the antecedent of the counterfactual and the law we can deduce the consequent of the counterfactual
• D. they are both necessarily true
• E. none of the above

10. According to Lambert and Britten, the statement "All unicorns are fleet of foot.":

• A. is a lawlike statement
• B. contains only "purely qualitative predicates"
• C. is an analytic statement
• D. is not a lawlike statement
• E. none of the above