Re: The 'formalising' of dialectics.

On Jul 2, 7:15=A0am, John Holmes <jhol...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> That would be Stephen Jay Gould, I do believe.

The evolutionary biologist Maynard Smith, who considered himself a
Marxist and was--it must be said--a greater biologist than Gould, took
a sort of middle position. Smith held the dialectic is obsolute,
because its subject matter is treated more exactly by systems theory.
He regarded the key concepts as _threshhold_, which served for the
transformation of quantity into quality, and _feedback_, which dealt
with the complex forms of causality that dialectics embrace. So Smith
was stimulated by dialectics, but stimulated to develop a game-
theoretic approach to evolution that he regarded as implicitly
dialectical.

But dialectics is broader than systems-theoretic effects. The question
is how to subsume the variety of its expressions under genuinely
parsimonious concepts.

srd