I am finding this discussion most frustrating. I wish I could easily
collocate all the posts I've written in the past dozen years on this
subject. Sigh. . . .
Briefly:
(1) Seed, imaginary numbers as negation of negation: stated and argued in
this manner: these examples are empty verbiage. Engels was indeed in
pursuit of something much ore serious, but along the way he dropped a
number of ill-thought-out examples in his _unpublished_ writing, which was
later taken as gospel.
(2) Confirmation of dialectical laws (or of formal logic): there is a basic
conflation between natural law and logical law. Engels seems to have
finessed the distinction, and the garbling was never corrected, though
there have been attempts to do so (cf. Richard Norman). Formal logical
laws make no direct assertions about ontological matters such as stasis,
motion, change, etc. The real issue is the relationship of logic to
ontology. These problems arise in the fusion of logic with ontology, as
occurs historically with interpretations of both formal and dialectical
logic. But if logic is conceived as a mode of valid and consistent
inference of statements one from another, and not as a direct set of
assertions about being, then the relationship between conceptions of logic
and ontology can evolve into a more mature analysis. If it turns out that
we cannot adequately formulate a system of assertions about being without
eliminating the contradictory relationships between categories, then
dialectical logic has something to do. But physical processes have nothing
to do with dialectical laws per se; rather, dialectical laws, if such
exist, are logical abstractions describing the categorial relationships of
concepts (which in turn reference empirical realities) one to another.
(3) Confirmation of dialectical laws/processes: the historical problem with
diamat rhetoric is the positing of correlations of abstract categorial
statements (which cannot deduce empirical matters, as we should know since
Hume and Kant) with specific empirical contents (scientific theories &
examples of natural phenomena). To wit, your examples:
CB: I don't recall if I said it here, but his formulation "there is only
matter and its mode of existence is motion" seems a quite exact forumuation
of the philosophical-physics issue that was addressed experimentally by
Michelson and Morley in discovering no absolute rest/ether and used
theoretically by Einstein in the relativity of all motion ( no absolute
rest). Change is absolute. Rest is relative. It's quite a remarkable
philosophical anticipation of the events in actual physics.
Also, the way Engels emphasizes in _The Dialectic of Nature_ the
transformations of one form of matter into another makes me think about E =
MC squared which is a formula for the transformation of mass into energy and
vica versa. I haven't thought this one through as much, but there might be
something there.
Note that general ontological statements about matter, motion, energy, etc.
lack the specificity to be translated into special relativity or any other
scientific theory. There is no substance here to the argument that Engels
anticipates relativity. A better developed argument would look for more
substantive remarks by Engels and show that the world-picture delineated
therein has some substantive relationship to the conceptual reorganization
mandated by revolutionary developments in scientific theories.
You may be right about heuristics, but in context of this discussion, I
would again bring up Gerald Holton's notion of themata.
At 11:17 AM 5/24/2005 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:
Ralph Dumain
Any of these in turn: false, trivial, elementary.
^^^^
CB: Taking these in turn gives a kind of silly result. False is the opposite
of elementary, elementary meaning a basic _truth_. Trivial means true too.
^^^^^
The silliest examples
are those which make little sense: the seed is the negation of the
negation;
^^^^^
CB: The seed ? Do you mean the flower is the negation of the negation of the
seed ? Make little sense ? Makes perfect sense. You start out with some
_thing_ a seed, and you end up with it gone, negated. But clearly something
_else_ now existing came out of something that no longer exists. And there
is the stage of the plant inbetween the seed and the flower, so there is a
place for "double negation".
This is such a lovely and , yes, elementary, natural, fundamental example, I
can't imagine why any dialectician would want to discard it.
^^^^
imaginary numbers are the negation of the negation.
^^^^^
CB: Again, elementary. As math goes through defining its basic sets of
numbers, it's not hard to conceive of the category imaginary numbers as some
"double not" of the previously established sets. Natural, whole, integers,
rational, irrational, real, imaginary. Irrationals are _not_ expressible as
the ratio of two integers. Imaginaries are _not_ something or other.
^^^^^
There are
better examples which never get beyond the elementary: water -> steam =
quantitative -> qualitative change. I'm not bothered by this, though Sartre
has an interesting counter-argument in his 1946 essay "Materialism and
Revolution." The problem is, what use is it to prove the truth of a
dialectical law by means of such isolated examples? There has to be some
overall systematic way in which an analysis makes a difference to adopt a
dialectical conception. Most of these examples taken from natural phenomena
are either logically flawed or fairly trivial or both. Hence
"silly".
^^^^^^
CB: I'd read Engels' "laws" as sort of heuristics. Maybe this is the way to
bring in Stephen Gould's idea of heuristic. The examples don't "prove" the
"law". They are examples of the expression of the law.
Take formal logic. If I give an example illustrating modus ponens, it
doesn't prove modus ponens. But we wouldn't call the illustration silly.
On the other hand, we don't really prove the first principles of formal
logic or mathematics, do we ? They are assumed. Axioms or the first laws of
math or logic are not proven. They are asserted, a priori.
Plus, I think the principle of dialectics is exactly anti-universal,
anti-"overall systematic way". Change is absolute. Rest is relative. The
only "overall systematic" is "no permanent overall systematic".
^^^^^^^
A more productive approach would be to criticize the logical structure of an
interlocking system of concepts as being an inadequate characterization of a
complex whole. But this has nothing to do with putting some real world
event in one-to-one correspondence with some dialectical law.
The second consideration is the type of phenomenon under
investigation. Engels' unfortunate formulation of a unified system of
dialectical laws governing nature, society, and thought obscures the issues
and vitiates whatever virtues can be found in his version of emergent
materialism, which was historically important in delineating qualitative
distinctions that would show how historical materialism--the analysis of
social organization and its development--functioned as opposed to the
confused logical structure of the vulgar biologism and ersatz evolutionism
that ran rampant in the second half of the 19th century. Biologism and
evolution became master metaphors at that time as mechanics had become
earlier, and thus the formation of a proper unified scientific perspective
as biology was added to the scientific revolutions in physics and chemistry,
and social theory/science (beyond political economy) was in its
embryonic stages.
A pure dialectic of nature sans society and mind (which is where emergent
materialism becomes most crucial and remains so) may serve some function, as
a counter to mystification and philosophical confusion, but the generic
issues involved are not so easily formulated in concrete terms, and the
non-sociological (i.e. theological, metaphysical, epistemological)
mystifications matter in a more general world-view sense. For example, the
late 19th century saw a more unified picture of forms of energy (though I
can't recall whether electromagnetism and kinetic energy fit into a
consistent unified system at the time--I've lost the relevant brain cells),
a unity which Engels for reasons I don't recall felt the need to
address. And this was before the crisis in physics that led to the
revolutionary developments of the 20th century kicked in, though a
questioning of basic concepts was afoot. In what sense can we say that
Engels latched onto the key philosophical dilemmas embedded in the physical
world picture? What mystifications did he address and what conceptual
developments did he anticipate (that involve only physics and chemistry--for
the purpose of argument)?
^^^^
CB: I don't recall if I said it here, but his formulation "there is only
matter and its mode of existence is motion" seems a quite exact forumuation
of the philosophical-physics issue that was addressed experimentally by
Michelson and Morley in discovering no absolute rest/ether and used
theoretically by Einstein in the relativity of all motion ( no absolute
rest). Change is absolute. Rest is relative. It's quite a remarkable
philosophical anticipation of the events in actual physics.
Also, the way Engels emphasizes in _The Dialectic of Nature_ the
transformations of one form of matter into another makes me think about E =
MC squared which is a formula for the transformation of mass into energy and
vica versa. I haven't thought this one through as much, but there might be
something there.
^^^
Let's fast-forward to Lenin's MATERIALISM AND EMPIRIO-CRITICISM. Lenin
attacks the mystifications surrounding of recent philosophies of science and
the nascent mystifications of brand-new developments. He claims that a
conceptual revolution is under way that will radically change our picture of
the physical world and understanding of its basic elements and their
interrelations. These conceptual difficulties show that a dialectical world
picture of the physical world must emerge. In a vague, generic sense his
prediction was correct--the interconvertibility of mass and energy, the
intimate relation of space and time and ultimately matter/energy,
wave-particle duality, the uncertainty principle, the principle of
complementarity. Paradox upon paradox builds up as physics evolves in the
next century.
My point here is: to analyze the structure of whole systems of concepts and
physical interrelationships is a far more sophisticated endeavor that to
take isolated examples of specific entities and transformations as
validating instances of a dialectical law. The problem is then to match up
in a systematic and sufficiently delineated manner the logical relationships
implicit from a dialectical perspective with the specific logical structures
of scientific theories. This is customarily not done,
because the customary practice is to match up nebulous philosophical
sloganeering with empirical or theoretical scientific examples. Hence
dialectics never has more than an intuitive feel, or, alternatively, bogs
down in crudely delineated logical arguments.
^^^
CB: I'd say use the elementary/silly examples to develop the heuristic sense
of it. Then when engaging more complicated matters, go for it with that
heuristic sense.
I think the current importance of dialectics goes back to a more elementary
level , actually. It is the role that dialectics plays in atheism. In the
U.S., the attacks on science and scientific thinking are at the elementary ,
silly level.
^^^^^^
And remember that so far I am restricting the discussion to physics and
chemistry.
^^^^
CB: Yea, I gave you a fairly profound and ,actually, "overall" example from
physics.
^^^^^^^
"Marxism" has a world-view interest in what goes on here, even
though it lacks a direct scientific competence in these areas and a mandate
to interfere. And of course natural scientific knowledge is an ineluctable
component of the overall world picture and cannot be sundered from social
scientific and culturological knowledge, though qualitative distinctions are
discernable. And there there is the role of science--and images of
science--in the overall ideological life of society, which is where
metaphorical extension and mystification play a part. "Marxism" wants to
know why scientific theory turns into mysticism at the hands of bargain
basement philosophers and popularizers.
Once we get to the more arcane problems of biological entities, including
the emergence of conscious, intelligent life--mind and society--the urgency
of an emergent materialist perspective (one aspect of dialectics) and the
structural interrelationships within complex phenomena (also codified in the
word "dialectics") becomes more serious and the arguments more compelling.
The basic flaw in the kindergarten arguments to which we are accustomed lies
in a simple minded triangulation of formal logic, 'dialectical logic', and
empirical examples. But, I argue, what makes dialectics 'dialectical' is a
categorial overview of conceptual structures on a systemic scale--the
structural interrelationships of systems of concepts and their
interpretation.
^^^^^^
CB: I'd say it has a role at the overall level and at the elementary level.
There are mutiple levels of wholes, embedded in each other. That is more a
dialectical picture of "the" whole.
Charles
P.S. Will get to earlier post. Took these out of order.
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