Re: The 'formalising' of dialectics.

On Jul 3, 1:09=A0am, "Jim F." <m...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> The British biologist J.B.S. Haldane claimed that much
> of his research was inspired by dialectical materialism.
> See Helena Sheehan's discussion of this
at:http://webpages.dcu.ie/~sheehan=
h/haldane.htm


Two interesting parts of that article:


(1) He (Haldane) did not, however, want to give a false impression nor
to arouse exaggerated expectations. He warned that, in discerning the
relation of Marxism to science, it was im****tant to proceed with the
greatest caution. At best, Marxism would only tell a scientist what to
look for. It would rarely, if ever, tell him what he was going to
find. Marxism, in his opinion, had a twofold bearing on science: it
was relevant in illuminating the social relations of science as well
as in handling problems of "pure" science. It shed light on the
history of science by studying science as a human activity, and on the
philosophy of science by analysing the most general patterns of
development permeating nature, society, and human thought. Marxism
proved of the greatest value to science in highlighting the process of
the development of science and the relation****p of the different
sciences to one another.

(2) Haldane laid great stress on dialectics, which he elaborated, in
the manner of Engels, as the "science of the most general laws of
change" in society, in consciousness and in the external world, and he
made much of the three principles of dialectics that had by this time
become formalised in textbooks of dialectical materialism. The
principle of the unity of opposites meant that matter was something
much richer and more complicated than mechanistic materialists ever
dreamed. It was exemplified in quantum mechanics in which the electron
displayed properties both of waves and of particles, in metabolism in
which living substance was a unity of anabolism and catabolism, in
pulsating stars as the result of a conflict between nuclear and
gravitational forces. Progress occurred through conflict. Such
internal contradictions did not mean that nature was irrational, but
did mean that it was unstable. The more man studied nature, the more
was it found that what was apparently stable turned out to be a
battlefield of opposing tendencies. Haldane insisted that union of
opposites was a hard physical fact. There were contradictions in
matter. The principle of the passage of quantity into quality meant
that transformation was not simply a matter of continuous variation
and that there were properties of a system as a whole that could not
be located in any particular aspect of it. It was exemplified not only
in the classic example of boiling or freezing water, but in such newer
discoveries as the thresholds of nerve cells. The principle of the
negation of negation meant the sudden emergence of novelty,
exemplified in geology in the formation of mountain ranges, in biology
in the dependence of evolution on variation and selection, in
psychology in the need to pass through guilt, the negation of
innocence, in order to aspire to virtue.