Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 22:40:58 -0400 (EDT)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: dialectics



I have been keeping out of this, but I thought I'd put in my two cents.

Dialectics is not one thing. Hegel's dialectics is not Aristotle's,
Aristotle's is not Plato's, Plato's is not Marx's, etc. You cannot
determine what these various thinkers have meant by dialectics without
detailed study of what they said about it, a study which cannot elidethe
differences aming them. Least of all can you derive what something that
might be dialectics is from a half-baked etymology of the Greek, which as
fara s I know, none of us know. Greek that is.

 Asto whether dialectics is
a "logic," it's not on any of the sensenes which the term "logic: has been
used, mainly referring to theories of the formal relations between
propositions understood from a purely synatical point of view (that is,
apart from the meaning of any of the propositions or their constituent
terms) in virtue of which some propositions imply others, i.e., the
study of valid arguments as such. Whether or not some form or other of
dialectics admits of two, three, or many truth values (i.e., true, false,
neither, who knows what) for propositions may be an interesting issue, but
even if some dialectics (say Hegel's) has a view about that, that does not
make Hegel's dialectivs a three valued logic in the sense that, say,
Brouwer's is, 

--Justin


On Tue, 16 Jul 1996 ROSSERJB-AT-jmu.edu wrote:

>      I "second" Jukka Laari's remarks with one further
> addendum.  The "dia" most definitely refers to "two."
> A "dialogue" is between exactly two parties (in Plato's
> dialectical dialogues presenting opposing positions).
> When one party is speaking it is a "monologue."
>      If dialectics is not a "two-valued logic" then what
> is it?  A many valued logic?  A fuzzy valued logic?  A
> no value logic?  Not a logic?
> Barkley Rosser, (elementary school, my dear Watson, :-))
> 
> 
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