Is the Progress of Science Dialectical?

Abstract

The claim that science advances according to a dialectical logic is not an unfamiliar one. It has always been a staple of Marxism-Leninism. And now that the empiricist account of scientific change in terms of the gradual accretion of law-like generalizations of ever wider scope has been discredited, Marxist philosophers are wont to say, somewhat smugly, that their dialectical principles prevented them from falling into the logical empiricist trap in the first place. Long before Kuhn and Toulmin came along with their talk of revolution and evolution, Marxists knew that change in science is dialectical. They did not need the critiques of empiricist theories of meaning, the appeals to the history of science, the analyses of theory-replacement, that now propelled others to new accounts of scientific change. Dialectical materialism had assured them, on antecedent grounds, that all development, whether of matter or of knowledge, must be dialectical in character. The dialectical model, in consequence, could resolve the deep differences that separate Kuhn, Lakatos, Popper, et al So the story goes, at least.