I don’t know if this is going to speak to many here, I hope it does, but it’s good anyway in the process of trying to understand what dialectical science would look like, as opposed to our current outlook on science which is metaphysical.
By which I don’t mean the scientific method, or scientists themselves, but science as a whole and as itself. If we hold that it doesn’t exist outside society (and of course it doesn’t), then science has a philosophical character. Metaphysics being the contradiction to dialectics, it’s also not the philosophy of the bourgeoisie but rather the philosophy that was the most advanced, the most usable for people’s needs, before we discovered dialectics. Much like we first learned to make stone tools before we learned to make them with metal, we first had to know metaphysics and idealism before we could know dialectics and materialism.
Today, science is taught metaphysically; it is seen metaphysically, it’s practiced metaphysically, and we take that as fact. We have trouble seeing science any other way because this way makes sense to us, it’s all we know.
If you were already aware of this character (studying in isolation, with observations and facts plucked out of their dialectical process and studied by themselves), this question should make sense to you. How do we rethink science in a way that is dialectical. Basically, in a way that we are still doing and studying science, but dialectically?
And of course I don’t mean generalities like “it would be placing dialectics back in science”, I want to see how far we can struggle with it.
I’m not sure I’d agree that modern science is taught non-dialectically at an advanced level. When studying the human body, you’re not studying each organ in isolation (aside from some simplification depending on the level of study). When studying biological evolution, you’re not ignoring the material conditions at the time. At some point, you have to draw a line between what is likely relevant and what isn’t, because no scientist can have advanced knowledge in every single field
I agree with the first sentence to a certain extent. The problem I think is how much we want to concede something as being metaphysical vs dialectical (both being in contradiction with each other). Within the study of the human body, there are many different fields that do not entirely interact with each other: one is concerned with studying the illnesses of the body (medicine), another is concerned with studying the metabolism (biology). Nutrition, pharmacology, biomechanics, sport sciences, etc.
Where is the metaphysics there; is it in the number of fields, in what they study and focus on? I think that’s the crux of the question and I don’t have a definitive answer yet.
Likewise, I wouldn’t say that knowledge in every field = dialectical. Dialectics looks at processes and certainly needs to look at the entire process, but it doesn’t have to look at every single process and contradiction that exists. Rather, I think we would start having to think about how we teach science differently, in a way that’s dialectical. Though again that’s the original question lol. So to summarize, I would more easily say that I don’t see “knowing specialized knowledge” as being contradictory to dialectics.
It’s true that different fields focus on different areas of a dialectically connected field, but I don’t think they necessarily ignore the relevant processes outside of their focus (for the most part), they just don’t focus on it. It does vary – study of medicine is also concerned with metabolism to a significant degree, whereas study of metabolism might largely ignore external processes. Ideally (no pun intended) it would take them into consideration, but realistically you’d just have scientists from different fields working together rather than making one person try to understand the highly complex web of processes
(I’m only talking about natural science; I think we can all agree that Western social science is highly undialectical)