Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
Posts must ask a question.
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
Try [email protected] if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
Posts about mental health should go in [email protected] you are loved here :meow-hug: but !mentalhealth is much better equipped to help you out <3.
Dialectics doesn't really imply pairs of things, there can be any number of things that are all each other's opposites. When we look at a single relation, it is between two things, but a full analysis very often includes multiple relations.
It is worth noting that whether dialectics applies to the natural world like chemistry inside plants is a topic of some controversy. Mao also uses the word "contradiction" in a very general sense, other writers might mean something more specific by it.
whether dialectics applies to the natural world like chemistry inside plants
There is an entire field of systems biology that studies biology through a quantitative framework where biological processes are regulated by complex feedback loops. That’s basically what dialectics is in its modern form.
Where can I read about this? I'm occasionally on a biology hyperfocus binge, gotta lay out the reading for the next one
Dialectics doesn't really imply pairs of things, there can be any number of things that are all each other's opposites.
Whoops I meant to ask moreso: Why does the base unit have to be an opposite though? Why not a triad?
It is worth noting that whether dialectics applies to the natural world like chemistry inside plants is a topic of some controversy.
Thats true, maybe I shouldn't focus on that part so much and instead focus on its application in social sciences. Thanks for the clarification.
The base unit is a relation. I at least see no reason why you could not choose to think of some system as a triad with a single relation, but I'm not sure how the result would be different from seeing it as two or three simple relations, or as a relation between one of the triad (at a time) and the rest of the system. After all, both sides of the relation also have their internal structure and contradictions.
there aren't just two chemical reactions acting in opposition to each other, or a set of pairs of chemical reactions, right?
actually that is sort of how chemistry works, you can introduce additional substances to change the result of the reaction, but a chemical reaction is a resolving of contradictions of sorts.
You need to think “feedback loops”, where an entire series of interactions with one another in complex manners (“contradictions”) and can give rise to emergent properties (all that is solid melts into air…)
Systems theory, which comes from the cybernetics theory of the 1930s, is arguably a modern, repackaged, quantitative version of dialectics. Both attempt to look at the world and understand it as shaped by complex interactions among its constituent components, rather than examining the individual parts (reductionism) which formed much of the basis of modern scientific framework.
In other words, dialectical framework examines and sees the world as a series of “contradictions” (relations between components and their interactions) rather than reductionist methodology that breaks down complex systems into their individual parts to simplify the attempt to understand them.