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This matter of dialectics and formal logic is pretty complex and I'm not an expert in either, so I'll just point one thing out. Logic, especially since work by Frege, has come a long way from the Aristotelian rules of inference. Many of the complaints I hear about formal logic (and hence in favour of dialectics) relate to logic being incapable of representing change, relations, etc. This is perhaps somewhat true of classical logics, but there have been formalisations of these things since. For example relational semantics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kripke_semantics Generally, I think there probably is something to dialectics at least as a heuristic. That said, I also think it gets overused to justify nonsense and to make claims without the required evidence. For example the notion that the universe must be infinite in time and space, because dialectics, seems rather overstated to me. --David. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
