Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:In

March 19, 2012 at 3:17 pm #87960

Keymaster

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

In fact, Dietzgen’s rather poor, a priori speculations are far easier to refute than are those of Engels and Plekhanov. But we can discuss this further the moment you post something — anything — of his that is worthy of merit. And by a priori speculation I mean assertions like this: “As a review in the October 1998 Standard put it ‘dialectics means that, in analyzing the world and society, you start from the basis that nothing has an independent, separate existence of its own but is an inter-related and interdependent part of some greater whole (ultimately the whole universe) which is in a process of constant change.'” Not only is there no proof of this, there couldn’t be. For example, how is it possible for everything to be ‘inter-related’ when there are vast regions of space and time that are, and always will be, inaccessible to us? On this, look up ‘light cone’ using Google — for example:

I don’t see how this refutes the philosophical assumption of the nature of “reality” made by Dietzgen that all that “exists” is the universe as a whole and that what humans do, to understand so as to better live in it, is to name parts of it as if they were separate things, to describe these parts and form theories on the basis of this. In other words, that the world we observe and perceive is not made up of separate things but that supposedly separate things only exist as these in our minds. In reality these are only parts of a larger whole and so are inter-related in this sense.You seem to be assuming that what Deietzgen was saying is that the world is made up of separate things and that these things are inter-related as separate things. But that’s not what he was saying. Quite the opposite in fact. So light cones and so-called inaccessible regions of space and time do not invalidate his basic assumption. In fact, these are descriptions, based on our observations of part of the world of phenomena, which we use to try to explain what we observe (or, rather, in these cases, of what scientists use to explain what they observe). What Dietzgen was advancing was in fact a theory of the nature of science.