 know about, but which proceed in accordance with these "laws" independently of our knowing them. Such a contention can appear paradoxical only to those who are still under the spell of the old antitheses of a priori and a posteriori, or of "analytic" versus "synthetic" knowledge.
The distinguishing feature of principles of materialism and dialectics is that they concern categories. They lay down correct ways of assembling relatively abstract items of information in order to arrive at concrete and informative conclusions. Category principles, considered in their aspect as reflecting objective reality or "the nature of things", are characterised by their absolute generality (corresponding to Aristotle's conception of truths true of "being as being"), in distinction from generalisations of natural or social sciences which deal with particular classes of phenomena. As I have said, this "quantitative difference" of degree of generality marks a "qualitative difference" in the character of the generalisations.
Of course, as Engels often and justifiably insisted, such generalisations, far from being spun out of the mind from its own inner resources independent of all experience (the conception of the mind spinning anything out of itself independent of experience is absurd) are arrived at as a result of experience. And naturally, errors or crudities in their formulation may be detected as a result of contradictions with experience. But the test or demonstration of the correctness or otherwise of such generalisations goes beyond merely ascertaining their empirical confirmation. Their demonstration depends on demonstrating, not as with empirical laws that they are not in fact falsified, but that to imagine their falsification results in "absurdity" or "fancy" in the sense of uninformativeness.
For example, Marx's principle that "social being determines consciousness" was arrived at by studying the facts of human history, and criticising the conclusions reached by historians and sociologists who proceeded on an opposite principle. But in its generalised form, "being is prior to thinking", this principle is one which must necessarily be observed in assembling information, because not to do so is to introduce uninformative fancies in principle unverifiable. In that respect it differs from Marx's formulation of the basic law of development of human society, which dealt with the particular way in which men live by developing a mode of production.
Thus Engels, with complete consistency, said on the one hand that laws of dialectics are "laws of thought", and on the other (in the preface to Anti‑Dühring) that "there could be no question of building the laws of dialectics into nature, but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it". He went on to say that "the revolution which is being forced on natural science by the mere need to set in order the purely empirical discoveries . . . must bring the dialectical character of natural events more and more to the consciousness even of those empiricists who are most opposed to it . . . It is possible to reach this standpoint because the accumulated facts of natural science compel us to do so; but we reach it more easily if we approach the dialectical character of these facts equipped with the consciousness of the laws of dialectical thought."
SOURCE: Cornforth, Maurice. Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy. 2nd ed. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1967 (orig. 1965). Part III, chapter 2, pp. 285-302.
Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy: Contents
Science and Evaluation by Maurice Cornforth
Logical Empiricism by Maurice Cornforth
Vienna Circle, Karl Popper, Frankfurt School, Marxism, McCarthyism & American Philosophy: Selected Bibliography
Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) Study Guide
Salvaging Soviet Philosophy (1)
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