/sci/ - Science & Math

Is Dialectical Materialism (formerly Historical Materialism) a science? Marxists claim it is because it is a materialist view instead of a subjectivist one. DiaMat posits three laws which matter abides by:

1) The law of the unity and conflict of opposites.

2) The law of the passage of quantitative
changes into qualitative changes.

3) The law of the negation of the negation.

Granted these are Engles laws, which were expanded on by Lenin and Mao. DiaMat to this day hasn't been successfully refuted by scientists, its mostly just ignored. Jay Gould did use DiaMat however in his theory of punctuated equilibrium. A summery of the materialist outlook of DM can be found in the image, written by Stalin, who considered himself a social scientist.

>>10326292
No but it can have pseudo-scientific practices. The issue with psychology is that philosophy comes into it in a more obvious way than it does for mathematics or physics. For example, Lenin and Stalin believed that the human mind is simply a reflection of the material world, its the material that makes the person rather than the the person making the material and humans develop dialectically, with the environment going in, them giving back and the environment being changed but going back into and so people develop materially with no input from some "higher consciousness" or spirituality.

Freud likewise was a materialist, although engaged in metaphysics and was an idealist. Freud and Lenin frequently argued about psychology.

Its not they were being "unscientific", its that psychology is qualitatively different from physics or maths and requires a different approach.

>>10302355
I don't know, I have different ideas because I don't know. I didn't "hit myself hard", I'm not saying what I'm saying is true, I'm just speculating. If I had to bet on any interpretation I'd bet on the Marxist one, that consciousness is an emergent property of masses of neurons that reflects matter. But it could equally be wrong.