What is Dialectic? Some remarks on Popper ’s criticism

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What is Dialectic?
Some remarks on Popper’s criticism

Berry Groisman
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics,
University of Cambridge,
Cambridge CB3 0WA, UK
bg268 at cam.ac.uk

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00003980/01/What_is_Dialectic_110408.pdf

VI. Summary

The aim of this work was neither to present a (brief) review or study
of modern dialectic nor to discuss the applicability of the
dialectical approach to all development processes in Nature5. The aim
of this work was to reassess the relevance of Popper's criticism of
the applicability of the dialectical approach to the development of
scientific theories and scientific thought. I have presented and
discussed the main points of Popper's criticism of dialectic and have
concluded that it is *unsound*. I argued that Popper has significantly
contributed to the link that was unfortunately created between
dialectical materialism as a philosophical-scientific system and
communist ideology. The latter found itself misused by several
totalitarian regimes. Popper politicized dialectic helping to build
prejudices against it. In the interest of anti-dogmatic science these
prejudice should be dissolved. Thus, this work is an attempt to
rehabilitate dialectic by addressing Popper's original
criticism. And finally, I would like to mention the main lessons that
dialecticians should learn from Popper's criticism in the light of my
previous discussion. It is important that theoreticians of dialectical
materialism will do more to depoliticise it. In particular, they
ought to convey that its application to the society and history, i.e.
historical materialism, should not make any exact social predictions.
In addition, the dialectical approach certainly suffers from its
apparent applicability to “everything”, the problem that raised
the most serious objections from Popper. Indeed, it should be
clarified how dialectic classifies and differentiates different
processes and types of connections in the world.

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