First, I'd suggest looking at Engels' motives for doing what he did, which was not to present a finished ontology for all time but to combat the half-assed philosophical vulgarities of his day which were also interfering with a proper theoretical perspective on social organization. Duhring was only one example of the mismosh that occupied so much of the intellectual energy of the second half of the 19th century--second-rate metaphorical extensions of physics and biology into the social sciences, vulgar evolutionism, etc.
Secondly, I am reminded of a now-defunct journal of Marxist philosophy of science called SCIENCE & NATURE. See the table of contents on my web site:
http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/sncont.html
This journal illustrates the ups and downs of the subject, from attempts at refined thinking to the usual intellectual sloppiness and dogmatism, unfortunately practiced by the journal's editor.
There was at least one article by a Soviet scientist illustrating how dialectical thinking helped him. I can't be certain, but this might be the one, in issue #1:
NIKOLAI N. SEMYENOV: A study in creativity On Intuition Versus Dialectical Logic
As I recall, it really is an example of Holton's themata, as Jim has described it. In cases like this--theoretical problems in physical sciences--I think that's the only way the dialectical concept makes any sense. The conception of emergent properties, which ties into diamat--matters in certain types of cases, i.e. with the emergent properties of organisms, and ultimately with human existence--consciousness and social organization. There may also be some importance in physics or others areas--but in a much more subtle form than the generally crude conceptions of dialectic repeated ad nauseam.
The real question is which has done more harm--botched notions of subjective dialectic (logic) or of objective dialectic (dialectics of nature)? The two issues are linked though distinct. This reminds me that I need to write up my analysis of a British Marxist book from the '30s, ASPECTS OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM, is which the usual sloppy notions of dialectical logic were debated. When I acquired this recently, I was surprised to find how dogmatic and fuzzy-minded J.D. Bernal in response to reasonable objections. Allegiance to Soviet Marxism did a lot of harm, which obviously has yet to be undone.
I also have some more info for later on how party interference in science as well as other areas such as philosophy set the USSR back considerably. The record is disgraceful, esp. from 1929 on.
At 01:51 PM 3/8/2005 -0800, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
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
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