Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 04:05:18 -0500
From: rahul-AT-peaches.ph.utexas.edu (Rahul Mahajan)
Subject: Re: Dialectics of Nature


Lisa:

Finally, Engels, recommending a method of investigative, scientific
thought:

In order to understand the separate phenomena, we have to tear them out
of the general inter-connection and consider them in isolation, and
there the changing motions appear, one as cause and the other as effect.

_Dialectics of Nature_ Internat. Pub. 1940 page 174 [from notes for DN]

Rahul: This is about on the level of a small boy coming up to Einstein
after he's published the general theory of relativity and saying, "Think
really hard about apples." Well, duh. What do scientists do? They use this
method, and any other that works, to arrive at an understanding of the
phenomena they're investigating. They may do it well or badly, but this
doesn't mean that throwing a few vague words like crumbs to them is
suddenly going to revolutionize scientific thought.

Funny. What Engels recommends is the kind of mode that supposedly works
extremely well for physics, but not for other things. Many people call it
"reductionism" and say it's horribly "undialectical." Not only does it
often work well, you can, if you do it right, even get around what would
seem to be its inherent limitation, that the identities of the objects of
study change when you "tear them out of the general interconnection."

Rahul




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