LOV and LTV by Carrol Cox 06 February 2002 20:42 UTC
Charles, some where in Anti-Duhring Engels says that dialectics neither proves anything nor discovers anything new. Sorry I can't quote it exactly or give you an exact cite. Some writer used that as a text on the basis of which he rejected dialectics completely. ^^^^^^^^^ CB: Yes, I have a memory of something like that, but I can't remember the exact statement. I would think that it might be said of formal logic ( Aristotlean with recent additions) that it cannot discover anything new. We'd have to have the exact quote, but I would wonder about the idea that dialectics does not discover anything new. It would seem that Marx used the notion of the contradictions within capitalism as the source of the new society, socialism. This use of the logic of contradictions seems a use of dialectics to discover the fundamentals of the new society. So that would be dialectics involved in discovering something new. I also get the impression that Marx considered that he used dialectics in discovering the secret of surplus value, as he and Engels refer to it. Doesn't that seem dialectics involved in discovering something "new" ? ( I mean new to the science of political economy). In fact , I would almost say that dialectics helps with discovering the new, but maybe not proving things. Whereas, formal logic is used in proofs, but not to discover anything new.
