Concept
Dialectical logic
Overview
Dialectical logic is the system of laws of thought, developed within the Hegelian and Marxist traditions, which seeks to supplement or replace the laws of formal logic. The precise nature of the relation between dialectical and formal logic was hotly debated within the Soviet Union and China.
Contrasting with the abstract formalism of traditional logic, dialectical logic in the Marxist sense was developed as the logic of motion and change and used to examine concrete forms. Its proponents claim it is a materialist approach to logic, drawing on the objective, material world.
Stalin argued in his "Marxism and Problems of Linguistics" that there was no class content to formal logic and that it was an acceptable neutral science. This led to the insistence that there were not two logics, but only formal logic. The analogy used was the relationship between elementary and higher mathematics. Dialectical logic was hence concerned with a different area of study from that of formal logic.
The main consensus among dialecticians is that dialectics do not violate the law of contradiction of formal logic, although attempts have been made to create a paraconsistent logic.
Some Soviet philosophers argued that the materialist dialectic could be seen in the mathematical logic of Bertrand Russell; however, this was criticized by Deborin and the Deborinists as panlogicism.
Evald Ilyenkov held that logic was not a formal science but a reflection of scientific praxis and that the rules of logic are not independent of the content. He followed Hegel in insisting that formal logic had been sublated, arguing that logic needed to be a unity of form and content and to state actual truths about the objective world. Ilyenkov used Das Kapital to illustrate the constant flux of
A
{\displaystyle A}
and
B
{\displaystyle B}
and the vanity of holding strictly to either
A
{\displaystyle A}
or
¬
A
{\displaystyle \neg A}
, due to the inherent logical contradiction of self-development.
During the Sino-Soviet split, dialectical logic was used in China as a symbol of Marxism–Leninism against the Soviet rehabilitation of formal logic.
Recently, research on the formalization of dialectics also attracted scholars by applying formal non-classical logic such as paraconsistent logic.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Dialectic, it may be added, is no novelty in philosophy. Among the ancients Plato is termed the inventor of Dialectic; and his right to the name rests on the fact, that the Platonic philosophy first gave the free scientific, and thus at the same time the objective, form to Dialectic. Socrates, as we should expect from the general character of his philosophising, has the dialectical element in a predominantly…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Dialectical logic is; the author is tied to Dialectical logic in the knowledge graph.
The materialistic conception of history, as it is called, is due to Marx, and underlies the whole Communist philosophy. I do not mean, of course, that a man could not be a Communist without accepting it, but that in fact it is accepted by the Communist Party, and that it profoundly influences their views as to politics and tactics.
Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism
States what Dialectical logic is; the author is tied to Dialectical logic in the knowledge graph.
That is to say, in the Eleatics hitherto considered, we only have the proposition: “The nothing has no reality and is not at all, and thus what is called origin and decease disappears.” With Zeno, on the contrary, we certainly see just such an assertion of the one and removal of what contradicts it, but we also see that this assertion is not made the starting point; for reason begins by calmly…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Dialectical logic is; the author is tied to Dialectical logic in the knowledge graph.
Related ideas
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Marxism
- Materialism
- Soviet Union
- Aufheben
- Bertrand Russell
- Paraconsistent logic
- Logic
- Dialectic
- Formalism (philosophy)
- Evald Ilyenkov
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Non-classical logic.