I have always wondered about the fruitfulness of
abstract consideration of "dialectics," particularly
where they are (it is?) discussed as a "method." Here
Jim F seems to suggest the SJG thought that dialectics
was a "method" or at least a heuristic for producing
hypotheses. I have never seen any evidence that there
was ever any method for producing hypotheses,
dialectical or other.
To use SJG's contrast of Soviet (dialectical)-Western
(not dialectical -- mechanical? gradualist?
evolutionary?) scientific training, one would expect
to be able to test whether this supposed difference in
training made any difference in the kind of hypotheses
scientists from Soviet and non-Soviet backgrounds put
forward.
I have not done any such study, but I am very
skeptical that it would turn up any systematic
differences in the way science was done in the USSR vs
the US, or in the kinds of hypotheses created by
Soviet and American scientists. I expect that this is
so in part because scientists (in my experience) don't
pay a lot of mind of methodological broughaha that is
not immediately relevant to work they are doing. The
"transformation of quantity into quality" (for
example),a t that level of abstraction, is not
something with obvious application to just about
anything in practical scientific wirk, so is likely to
be ignored by practicing scientists.
This is what we would expect if we buy into the
broadly Kuhnian picture of science as involving
periods of "normal" science punctauted by episodic
"revolutionary" transformations that give scientists a
new "paradigm" to work out by "normal" scientific
methods. This picture of scientific activity -- which,
incidentally, sounds dialectical even though it was
developed by a nice liberal in Cold-War America (first
ed. of Kuhn's Structure of Sciebtofic Revolutions
published in 1960) -- suggests that most science is
going to be normal, incremental, evolutionary working
out of accepted big hypotheses until the general
framework cracks -- and this does not depend on the
particular training of scientists in doalectics (or
not).
In fact all the standard examples of scientific
revolutions come from science done by
non-dialectically trained thinkers -- Lavoisier's
discovery of oxygen, Einstein's theory of relativity,
Heisenberg, Dirac, and Bohr's development of quantum
theory, etc.
Anytway, I tink taht the meaning of diaklectics in,
for example, Hegel or (to a lesser extent) Marx is a
valid topic for inquiry, there has been less than no
payoff in the idea that there is something called the
dialectical method which can be grasp in advance of
and apart from one's scientific work in concreto and
used to adavance thatw ork.
jks
--- Jim Farmelant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> Here is what Stephen Jay Gould had to say about
> punctuationism
> and dialectics in his book, *The Panda's Thumb.
>
> There, in the essay "Episodic Evolutionary Change,"
> he wrote:
> --------------------------
> If gradualism is more a product of Western thought
> than a fact of nature,
> then we should consider alternate philosophies of
> change to enlarge our
> realm of constraining prejudices. In the Soviet
> Union, for example, for
> example, scientists are trained with a very
> different philosophy of
> change - the so-called dialectical laws,
> reformulated by Engels from
> Hegel's philosophy. The dialectical laws are
> explicitly punctuational.
> They speak, for example, of the "transformation of
> quantity into
> quality." This may sound like mumbo jumbo, but it
> suggests that change
> occurs in large leaps following a slow accumulation
> of stresses that a
> system resists until it reaches the breaking point.
> Heat water and it
> eventually boils. Oppress the workers more and more
> and bring on the
> revolution. Eldredge and I were fascinated to learn
> that many Russian
> paleontologists support a model very similar to our
> punctuated
> equilibria.
>
> I emphatically do not assert the general "truth" of
> this philosophy of
> punctuational change. Any attempt to support the
> exclusive validity of
> such a grandiose notion would border on the
> nonsensical. Gradualism
> sometimes works well. (I often fly over the folded
> Appalachians and
> marvel at the striking parallel ridges left standing
> by gradual erosion
> of the softer rocks surrounding them). I make a
> simple plea for pluralism
> in guiding philosophies, and for the recognition of
> such philosophies,
> however hidden and unarticulated, constrain all our
> thought. The
> dialectical laws express an ideology quite openly;
> our Western preference
> for gradualism does the same more subtly.
>
> Nonetheless, I will confess to a personal belief
> that a punctuational
> view may prove to map tempos of biological and
> geologic change more
> accurately and more often than any of its
> competitors - if only because
> complex systems in steady state are both common and
> highly resistant to
> change.
> -----------------------------
>
> I think a careful reading of Gould's words will
> indicate that he viewed
> dialectics as a heuristic for generating hypotheses
> concerning the
> behavior of complex systems. Note that he considered
> what he called the
> punctuational view to be a "constraining prejudice"
> - what sciece
> historian, Gerald Holton, (about whom Gould had
> written favorably in the
> NY Review of Books) would call a 'themata.' Note
> also that Gould talked
> about expanding our range of "constraining
> prejudices" rather than
> dogmatically insisting upon the need to replace
> gradualism by
> punctuationalism. Gould recognized that such views
> are not ultimately
> true or false but only more or less useful in
> helping us to formulate new
> testable hypotheses.
>
> Jim F.
>
> On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 13:44:12 -0500 "Charles Brown"
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > Marxism-Thaxis] OudeyisHegel,
> >
> > Marx, and, for that matter, Jay Gould (he and Dan
> Dennett - the
> > American reductionist philosopher - fought over
> this issue) did not
> > regard
> > development to be incremental or continuous. The
> dialectic, the
> > successive
> > emergence of negations of previous conditions
> suggests that
> > development hops
> > and jumps rather than grows by inches. The
> principle of Quantity is
> > also
> > not a case of incremental change. You can think
> of it as a teapot
> > on the
> > burner or the apparent lull before a sudden
> popular rising; the
> > conditions
> > conducive to a boiling pot or a popular uprising
> cook slowly without
> > any
> > apparent sign of dramatic change until a critical
> state is reached
> > and then,
> > things happen very suddenly indeed. The concept
> of Quantity for
> > Engels and
> > Marx as for Hegel refers to the sudden change of
> state rather than
> > to the
> > accumulation of conditions that engenders it.
> > The issue really is the essentialism that Marx and
> Engels adopted
> > from
> > Hegel. The significant fact of the sudden boil of
> the teapot and
> > the
> > popular uprising is the end product of the process
> that generates
> > them and
> > not the conditions. After all, a teapot on a low
> fire is just a
> > teapot on a
> > low fire and a long, hot Summer is just a long,
> hot, Summer; they
> > both only
> > become interesting when they result respectively
> in a pot of boiling
> > water
> > and an uprising of an angry community.
> > Victor
> >
> > ^^^^^
> >
> >
> > CB: My understanding of this is that there is a
> long period of
> > exactly
> > continuous or incremental change that is suddenly
> altered by the
> > leap, the
> > quantum leap or qualitative change. Dialectics
> doesn't deny
> > continous or
> > incremental change, rather it relates the two
> types of change,
> > quantitative
> > and qualitative.
> >
> > The temperature of the water is continously
> increasing, but the
> > surface is
> > not bubbling. At 212 degrees farenheit ,
> continuous, gradual change
> > leaps
> > into bubbles burst on the surface, a qualitative
> change in the
> > surface of
> > the water. This is quantitative change turning
> into qualititive
> > change or
> > continuous change turning into discontinuous
> change.
> >
> > Quantity turning into quality is a change in the
> type of change; it
> > is
> > quantitative _change_ turning into qualitative
> _change_.
> >
> > Evolution punctuated by revolution is another way
> of saying
> > quantitative
> > change turns into qualitative change.
> >
> > Socially, the ebb and flow of reform is
> evolutionary. It is change
> > without
> > changing the mode of production out of capitalism.
> Socialist
> > revolution is a
> > leap in which the mode of production changes.
> >
>
=== message truncated ===
__________________________________
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/
_______________________________________________
Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
