What Is Dialectical Logic?
For Marxists dialectics is the science of the most general laws of development in nature, society and thinking. So far so good, but the application of dialectics to the laws of logical thinking, or the definition as to what dialectical logic is, causes a great deal of disagreement. Many Marxists believe that there is a basic contradiction between formal logic and dialectical logic. Formal logic concerns itself with the extensional aspect of thinking, with the forms of thinking, viewing them as static, isolated entities. Dialectical logic however studies supposedly the intensional aspect of thinking, i.e. not its forms, but the contents of thinking, seeing it as a process of development. I disagree with this point of view. First of all, to assign to (dialectical) logic the study of the contents of thinking is to trespass on fields which are the concern of other scientific disciplines such as philosophy, epistemology, psychology, educational theory and others. Furthermore it would preven
