Module Code: HN5001

Module Title: Humanities II

Name of the Lecturer: Mr. J.A.D.F.M. Jayathilaka

ASSIGNMENT 2

Name: M.M.S. DILSHAN

Student ID No: 2013105CL1

Graduate Diploma Stage

QUESTION 01

i)

a ) Normal science "means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific
achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a
time as supplying the foundation for its further practice". These achievements must be
sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing
modes of scientific activity and sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the
redefined group of practitioners (and their students) to resolve. These achievements can be
called paradigms. Students study these paradigms in order to become members of the
particular scientific community in which they will later practice.

Because the student largely learns from and is mentored by researchers "who learned the
bases of their field from the same concrete models" there is seldom disagreement over
fundamentals. Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the
same rules and standards for scientific practice. A shared commitment to a paradigm
ensures that its practitioners engage in the paradigmatic observations that its own paradigm
can do most to explain. Paradigms help scientific communities to bound their discipline in
that they help the scientist to create avenues of inquiry, formulate questions, select
methods with which to examine questions, define areas of relevance. And establish or
create meaning. A paradigm is essential to scientific inquiry - "no natural history can be
interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and
methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism".

How are paradigms created, and how do scientific revolutions take place? Inquiry begins
with a random collection of "mere facts" (although, often, a body of beliefs is already
implicit in the collection). During these early stages of inquiry, different researchers
confronting the same phenomena describe and interpret them in different ways. In time,
these descriptions and interpretations entirely disappear. A pre-paradigmatic school
appears. Such a school often emphasizes a special part of the collection of facts. Often,
these schools vie for pre-eminence.

b ) Revolutions in science can be described as an "anomaly" arises when a puzzle,

considered as important or essential in some way, cannot be solved. The anomaly cannot be
written off as just an ill-conceived research project; it continues to assert itself as a thorn in
the side of the practicing scientists. The anomaly is a novelty that cannot be written off, and
which cannot be solved.
This opens up a period called the "crisis", during which time new methods and
approaches are permitted, since the older ones have proved incapable of rising to the task
at hand (solving the anomaly). Views and procedures previously considered heretical are
temporarily permitted, in the hope of cracking the anomaly.
One of these new approaches is successful, and it becomes the new paradigm through a
"paradigm shift". This constitutes the core of the scientific revolution.
The new paradigm is popularized in text-books, which serve as the instruction
material for the next generation of scientists, who are brought up with the idea that the
paradigm, once new and revolutionary, is just the way things are done. The novelty of the
scientific revolution recedes and disappears, until the process is begun anew with another
anomaly-crisis-paradigm shift.

c ) In the face of the arguments previously made, why does science progress, how
does it progress, and what is the nature of its progress?

To a very great extent, the term science is reserved for fields that do progress in obvious
ways. But does a field make progress because it is a science, or is it a science because it
makes progress? Normal science progresses because the enterprise shares certain salient
characteristics, Members of a mature scientific community work from a single paradigm or
from a closely related set. Very rarely do different scientific communities investigate the
same problems. The result of successful creative work is progress.

Even if we argue that a field does not make progress that does not mean that an individual
school or discipline within that field does not. The man who argues that philosophy has
made no progress emphasises that there are still Aristotelians, not that Aristotelians has
failed to progress. It is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both
obvious and assured. In part, this progress is in the eye of the beholder. The absence of
competing paradigms that question each other's aims and standards makes the progress of
a normal-scientific community far easier to see. The acceptance of a paradigm frees the
community from the need to constantly re-examine its first principles and foundational
assumptions. Members of the community can concentrate on the subtlest and most
esoteric of the phenomena that concern it. Because scientists work only for an audience of
colleagues, an audience that shares values and beliefs, a single set of standards can be taken
for granted. Unlike in other disciplines, the scientist need not select problems because they
urgently need solution and without regard for the tools available to solve them. The social
scientists tend to defend their choice of a research problem chiefly in terms of the social
importance of achieving a solution.

ii ) Scientists cannot by themselves "translate" between and old and a new paradigm; these
paradigms are "incommensurable", and can be translated only with the aid of historians and
philosophers of science. For example, the explanation for combustion before the oxygen
theory invoked a substance, widely accepted in the 18th century, which was given off when
a material burned. The modern theory explains the same phenomena as due to the taking-in
of oxygen, not the expulsion of the non-existent "phlogiston".
 If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of
terms like force, mass, space, and time, he does so less from the incomplete though
sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the
application of these concepts to problem-solution.
The transition from Newtonian to quantum mechanics evoked many debates about
both the nature and the standards of physics, some of which still continue. There are people
alive today who can remember the similar arguments engendered by Maxwells
electromagnetic theory and by statistical mechanics. And earlier still, the assimilation of
Galileos and Newtons mechanics gave rise to a particularly famous series of debates with
Aristotelians, Cartesians, and Leibnizians about the standards legitimate to science. When
scientists disagree about whether the fundamental problems of their field have been solved,
the search for rules gains a function that it does not ordinarily possess. While paradigms
remain secure, however, they can function without agreement over rationalization or
without any attempted rationalization at all.

QUESTION 02

i ) According to Paul Feyerabend The idea that science can, and should, be run according to
fixed and universal rules, is both unrealistic and pernicious. It is unrealistic, for it takes too
simple a view of the talents of man and of the circumstances which encourage, or cause,
their development. And it is pernicious, for the attempt to enforce the rules is bound to
increase our professional qualifications at the expense of our humanity.

In addition, the idea is detrimental to science, for it neglects the complex physical
and historical conditions which influence scientific change. It makes our science less
adaptable and more dogmatic: every methodological rule is associated with cosmological
assumptions, so that using the rule we take it for granted that the assumptions are correct.
Naive falsificationism takes it for granted that the laws of nature are manifest and not
hidden beneath disturbances of considerable magnitude. Empiricism takes it for -ranted
that sense experience is a better mirror of the world than pure thought.
Praise of argument takes it for granted that the artifices of Reason give better results
than the unchecked play of our emotions. Such assumptions may be perfectly plausible and
even true. Still, one should occasionally put them to a test. Putting them to a test means
that we stop using the methodology associated with them, start doing science in a different
way and see what happens. Case studies such as those reported in the preceding chapters
show that such tests occur all the time, and that they speak against the universal validity of
any rule. All methodologies have their limitations and the only 'rule' that survives is
'anything goes'.
ii ) Almost all the philosophers of science maintain that there are at least two conditions
which ought to be met by any theory that is proposed for acceptance. These conditions are
called consistency condition and correspondence condition,
According to the consistency condition, the new theory must be consistent with the already
well-established theories. In other words, the consistency condition seeks to guarantee that
a new theory correspond with known facts by being consistent with existing theories.
According to the second condition, the new theory must correspond to the well-established
facts which are primary because the consistency condition can be reduced to it.

iii ) Feyerabend insists that the real test of a theory may be possible only by adopting an
alternative theory. We might believe that our existing theories are well supported facts, but
there may be some facts which might go against these theories. However we may never
aware of there new facts unless we transcend these theories and adopt an alternative, just
as we cannot become aware of all the defects of our society unless we look at it from the
point of view of another society.
Feyerabend advocates that a new theory should not be constrained by the rule that it
should first correspond with facts which we already know. In fact, he says that we must
make deliberate attempts to develop theories which go counter to the so called known
facts.

QUESTION 03

I ) Reductionism refers to several related but distinct philosophical positions regarding the
connections between phenomena, or theories, "reducing" one to another, usually
considered "simpler" or more "basic". The Oxford Companion to Philosophy suggests that it
is "one of the most used and abused terms in the philosophical lexicon" and suggests a
three part division:

Ontological reductionism: a belief that the whole of reality consists of a minimal number of
parts

Methodological reductionism: the scientific attempt to provide explanation in terms of ever

smaller entities

Theory reductionism: the suggestion that a newer theory does not replace or absorb the
old, but reduces it to more basic terms. Theory reduction itself is divisible into three:
translation, derivation and explanation.

Reductionism can be applied to objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings.

In the sciences, application of methodological reductionism attempts explanation of entire
systems in terms of their individual, constituent parts and their interactions. For example,
the temperature of a gas is reduced to nothing but the average kinetic energy of its
molecules in motion. Thomas Nagel speaks of psychophysical reductionism (the attempted
reduction of psychological phenomena to physics and chemistry), as do others and physico-
chemical reductionism (the attempted reduction of biology to physics and chemistry), again
as do others. In a very simplified and sometimes contested form, such reductionism is said
to imply that a system is nothing but the sum of its parts. However, a more nuanced view is
that a system is composed entirely of its parts, but the system will have features that none
of the parts have."The point of mechanistic explanations is usually showing how the higher
level features arise from the parts.

ii ) A laboratory experiment is conducted under highly controlled conditions. Participants

are brought to a lab setting to be tested. The researcher manipulates aspects of the
environment in order to measure its impact on the participants behavior or performance
this is called the independent variable. The dependent variable is the change in behavior
that is measured by the researcher. The dependent variable is believed to be under the
control of the independent variable. All other variables are controlled as far as possible. This
way, conclusions of cause and effect can be made since only the independent variable is
controlled so it is assumed that this is what causes the behavior change.
This high level of control leads to experiment settings that are very unnatural, and
participants are often asked to complete very strange and bizarre tasks. Therefore,
individuals are more than likely going to behave very differently in laboratory experiment
situations than they would in real and natural settings. Consequently, laboratory
experiments lack ecological validity and mundane realism, as they are not true to real life.
This lack of ecological validity that surrounds laboratory experiments also makes it very
difficult to generalize finding from experiments to real life situations.
One further problem of laboratory experiments concerns ethics. There must always
be some form of deception involved in such experiments. If the participants knew every
aspect of the study, then it would be pointless to carry it out. In order to produce valid
results, participants must be deceived to some extent. However, there are guidelines that
must be followed regarding ethics, making it difficult for researchers to produce ethical
research.

If we summarize these facts we can see two major drawbacks in these controlled
experiments, they are
Internal validity: Do the data permit causal inferences?
Internal validity is a question of proper experimental controls and
Correct data analysis.
External validity: Can we generalize our inferences from the lab to the
Field?
 Problem of induction: Behavioral regularities persist in new situations as long as the
relevant underlying conditions remain essentially unchanged.
Problem of representativity: Are experimental subjects representative for out of sample
applications
iii ) The argument is based on the premise that modern science is quintessentially
reductionist. Its reductionist nature under-girds an economic structure based on
exploitation, profit maximization and capital accumulation. Reductionist science is also at
the root of the growing ecological crisis, because it entails a transformation of nature such
that the processes, regularities and regenerative capacity of nature are destroyed.

This reductionist method has its uses in the fields of abstraction such as logic and
mathematics, and in the fields of manmade artifacts such as mechanics But it fails singularly
to lead to a perception of reality (truth) in the case of living organisms such as nature,
including man, in which the whole is not merely the sum of the parts, if only because the
parts are so cohesively interrelated that isolating any part distorts perception of the whole.
So as a conclusion we can see Kuhns model of science has its own advantage in the fields
like logic, mathematics and all sorts of artificial (man-made) things. But when it comes to
living organisms like man, animals, plants and all sorts of other living things this method only
bring chaos and destruction to the whole world.
QUESTION 04

i ) Eucalyptus Planting

The introduction of Eucalyptus could have negative effects on the local environment,

Based on a detailed analysis it was considered that the indigenous plant species in
the majority of introduced Eucalyptus plantations were lesser than those in natural forests
and indigenous species plantations but more than those in other exotic species plantations,
mainly due to the unique eco-physiological characteristics of Eucalyptus and the irrational
plantation design and harvesting techniques, among which, anthropogenic factors played
leading roles.

Eucalyptus was introduced as a remedy for the deforestation and desertification. But
the biological wealth and diversity of the tropics have been destroyed to make room for the
reductionist solution, even though eucalyptus causes desertification, interrupts the cycle of
life, the hydrological cycle and the nutrient cycle.

Eucalyptus was introduced to Sri Lanka in the latter part of 18th century by planters
who had links with Australia. Some of these introductions have been very successful as
attested by many magnificent trees in and around tea estate gardens in Uva and Dimbulla. A
more organized attempt was made by the Botanic Gardens staff who obtained seeds of 50
species in 1880 and most of these were sent to Hakgala Botanical Gardens where a
plantation was formed in 1882. Some 20 of these species are still represented today in this
garden and have reached enormous size. In 1931, the Forest Department took a hand by
laying down seven series of arboretum plots to test the performance of Eucalyptus, Acacia,
Araucaria and Cuppressus under plantation conditions in the grasslands of Uva and
NuwaraEliya. These plots ranged from 1,210-1,970 m (4,000-4,500 feet) in altitude and
1,270-2,285 mm (50-90 inches) rainfall. The plot at 1,970 m (6,500 feet) at Kandapola is of
particular interest showing rapid growth and remarkably cylindrical stems in the case of
Eucalyptus maidenii, E. microcorys, E. pilularis, E. regnans, E. saligna, E. umbellata (syn,
tereticornis) and E. robusta. At the altitude 1,210 m (4,000 feet) the best performance have
been E. camaldulensis, E. citriodora and E. maculata. E. saligna, E. microcorys, E. pilularis
and E. robusta have shown a continued success in this altitudinal range (Warthingtonet al.,
1953).

To mitigate the negative effects of Eucalyptus introduction, the native trees and
understory vegetation in plantations should be kept intact during reforestation with
Eucalyptus to favor the normal development of plant community and regeneration. At the
same time, human disturbance should be minimized to facilitate the natural regeneration of
native species.
ii ) Pesticides

If the credits of pesticides include enhanced economic potential in terms of increased

production of food and fiber, and amelioration of vector-borne diseases, then their debits
have resulted in serious health implications to man and his environment. There is now
overwhelming evidence that some of these chemicals do pose a potential risk to humans
and other life forms and unwanted side effects to the environment (Forget, 1993;
Igbedioh, 1991; Jeyaratnam, 1981). No segment of the population is completely protected
against exposure to pesticides and the potentially serious health effects, though a
disproportionate burden, is shouldered by the people of developing countries and by high
risk groups in each country (WHO, 1990). The world-wide deaths and chronic diseases due
to pesticide poisoning number about 1 million per year (Environews Forum,1999).

The high risk groups exposed to pesticides include production workers, formulators,
sprayers, mixers, loaders and agricultural farm workers. During manufacture and
formulation, the possibility of hazards may be higher because the processes involved are not
risk free. In industrial settings, workers are at increased risk since they handle various toxic
chemicals including pesticides, raw materials, toxic solvents and inert carriers.

OC compounds could pollute the tissues of virtually every life form on the earth, the air, the
lakes and the oceans, the fishes that live in them and the birds that feed on the fishes
(Hurley et al., 1998). The US National Academy of Sciences stated that the DDT metabolite
DDE causes eggshell thinning and that the bald eagle population in the United States
declined primarily because of exposure to DDT and its metabolites (Liroff, 2000). Certain
environmental chemicals, including pesticides termed as endocrine disruptors, are known to
elicit their adverse effects by mimicking or antagonising natural hormones in the body and it
has been postulated that their long-term, low-dose exposure is increasingly linked to human
health effects such as immune suppression, hormone disruption, diminished intelligence,
reproductive abnormalities and cancer

Pesticides can contaminate soil, water, turf, and other vegetation. In addition to killing
insects or weeds, pesticides can be toxic to a host of other organisms including birds, fish,
beneficial insects, and non-target plants. Insecticides are generally the most acutely toxic
class of pesticides, but herbicides can also pose risks to non-target organisms.