Ralph Dumain: "The Autodidact Project": Review: Handbook of Pseudo-Dialectical Thinking: A Partial Review

Handbook of Pseudo-Dialectical Thinking:
A Partial Review

by Ralph Dumain

The Routledge International Handbook of Dialectical Thinking, edited by Nick Shannon, Michael F. Mascolo, Anastasia Belolutskaya. New York: Routledge, 2024.

Summary:

The Routledge International Handbook of Dialectical Thinking is a landmark volume offering a multi-disciplinary compendium of the research, theory and practice that defines dialectical thinking, its importance and how it develops over the lifespan. For the first time, this handbook brings together theory and research on dialectical thinking as a psychological phenomenon from early childhood through the human lifespan. Grounding dialectical thinking in multiple philosophical traditions stemming from antiquity, it explores current psychological models of such thought patterns and shows how these can be applied in everyday life and across multiple disciplines, including philosophy, physics, mathematics, and international relations. The handbook explains the nature of dialectical thinking, why it is important, and how it can be developed in children and in adults. It concludes with a final chapter depicting a discussion among the authors, exploring the question 'How could dialectical thinking be the antidote to dogma?' Written by a group of international scholars, this comprehensive publication is an essential reference for researchers and graduate students in psychology and the social sciences, as well as scholars interested in integrating different perspectives and issues from a wide variety of disciplines. (Publisher)

26 Can Dialectical Thinking be an Antidote to Dogma? A Conversation among Authors / Igor Shiyan, Olga Shiyan, Thomas R. Bidell, Angela Brandão, Harry Procter, Michael F. Mascolo, Anastasia Belolutskaya, Michael Basseches, Michaela A. Swales, Sergey Shevelukhin, José N. R. Croca, Nikolay E. Veraksa, Shannon Brincat, and Nick Shannon

Having just discovered The Routledge International Handbook of Dialectical Thinking, I am amazed that such a work even exists. I was initially excited by the title, but my enthusiasm was short-lived. There is undoubtedly interesting material as there are many authors and topics, but the book begins rather dubiously, even the title, which turns out to characterize a volume more oriented to psychology than to epistemology. Why dubiously? Because of the basic presupposition of what dialectics is that pervades the volume, with some individual contributions excepted, compounded by the psychology as a vantage point building on this presupposition.

Beginning with the editors, dialectics evidently is about accepting contradictions and reconciling them. Some authors claim that Westerners tend towards either/or thinking while the Chinese accept contradictions. This is the kind of banality I’m talking about. Other conceptions of dialectics are mentioned—such as Adorno’s—and a potted history of dialectics east and west is given, which is of some use, for the bibliographical references if nothing else. But already the introductory material strikes me as the epitome of academic superficiality.

About 45 years ago I perused the journal Human Development, which figures into the references here, as does one of its prominent contributors, Klaus F. Riegel. Dialectics played a big role in this journal, but I found its dominant conception of dialectics insipid as what I find here.

Before I broach what is objectionable about this volume I want to document the handful of references to the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, as well as other topics.

Evald Ilyenkov

Ilyenkov’s view of logic is discussed at length in the essay “The History of Dialectics in Russia” by Nikolay E. Veraksa and is also mentioned briefly in “Historical Problems of Dialectic and Dialectical Thinking” by Evgeni E. Krashenignnikov and in “Dialectics and Myth: Logical Structures and Cognitive Processes in Mythology” by Nina Bagdasarova.

1. “Dialectics and Myth: Logical Structures and Cognitive Processes in Mythology” by Nina Bagdasarova :

Other categories are also important for this chapter. I will use “structure” and “process” in the sense discussed by Bhaskar (2008, pp. 193, 196–197), who argued that our ability to categorize reality (i.e., to use mental structures for understanding and judgement) and our existence within spatial/temporal reality (i.e., the irreducible connection of our mental activity to ongoing processes) both have ontological status and cannot be considered as just a part of cognition. A similar understanding of these concepts in relation to the psyche was also present in the Soviet philosophical tradition of Ilyenkov (1977). Mental life can be analyzed both in terms of processes and structures. Processes are chains of mental events unfolded in time, while structures reflect an invariant relation between elements of mental content, such as images and concepts.”

There is no further discussion of Ilyenkov, just a reference:

Ilyenkov, E. (1977). The concept of ideal (Translated, abridged and amended by Robert Daglish. Philosophy in the USSR: Problems of dialectical materialism. Moscow: Progress, pp. 71–99.

And note:

Veraksa, N. E. (1990). Dialekticheskoe myshleniye i tvorchestvo (“Dialectical thinking and creativity”). Voprosy psikhologii (Issues in psychology), 4, 135–139.

Veraksa, N. E. (2009). Struktura i soderzhanie dialekticheskogo myshleniya. (Structure and content of dialectical thinking). Moscow: Moscow State University of Psychology and Education.

Veraksa, N. Е. (2010). Structural approach to dialectic cognition. Psychology in Russia: State of the Art, 3, 227–239. doi: 10.11621/pir.2010.0011

Veraksa, N. E., Belolutskaya, A., Vorobyeva, I., Krasheninnikov, E., Rachkova, E., Shiyan, I., & Shiyan, O. (2013). Structural dialectical approach in psychology: Problems and research results. Psychology in Russia: State of the Art, 6(2), 65–77, doi: 10.11621/pir.2013.0206. http://psychologyinrussia.com

Vvedensky, A. (1922). Logic as a part of the theory of cognition (Logika kak chast’ teorii poznaniya) (4th ed.). Moscow: Petrograd.

2. “Historical Problems of Dialectic and Dialectical Thinking” by Evgeni E. Krashenignnikov:

The author cites two orientations to dialectic: (1) in relation to metaphysics, (2) in relation to formal logic. He cites with extreme brevity dialectical thinkers throughout history. Then he brings up a barrage of questions about dialectic, among them whether it applies to ontology or just epistemology. He concludes with a multifarious advocacy of dialectic. The essay is quite pedestrian, though.

A notable statement:

Georg Lukács (1971) left quite a unique view of dialectical constructions on the basis of his analysis of social and economic relations. For Lukács, such constructions are not abstract schemes; neither do they describe an objective reality; dialectic offers a description that reflects a certain time—a certain age with all its beliefs—and this is why it can be called objective. Evald Ilyenkov (1977) became the one to revolutionize a dialectical understanding of the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete resulting in unity in diversity. The “one” becomes not an abstract idea of fundamental qualities of an object but the object itself in its multiple concrete representations and relations with the world.

3. “The History of Dialectics in Russia” by Nikolay E. Veraksa:

Furthermore, Kopnin accentuated the invidiousness of dividing thinking into dialectical and nondialectical. He believed that no non-dialectical concepts nor judgments could ever exist, since all judgments in contemporary science reflected their subject correctly. In Kopnin’s view, no other conclusion could have been made. If formal logic is the logic of form and dialectical logic is the logic of content and of the cognition of truth, then, indeed, there cannot be any division between dialectical and non-dialectical concepts. The reason is that everything related to form is the competence of formal logic, while everything related to content belongs to dialectics. Differences can emerge only if, with the same content, we can reveal dialectical and non-dialectical form.

This perspective was also shared by other philosophers. For instance, Ilyenkov saw the specifics of formal logic, or its contemporary form of mathematical logic, in the following:

In the procedure of purely formal drawing of combinations of signs and symbols from other combinations of signs-symbols. . . . The most specific and only subject of studies in mathematical logic are signs, symbols, and the ways to unite them in sign-based constructions. (Ilyenkov, 1979, pp. 134–135)

He emphasized the lack of any subject-specific content in formal logical transformations:

In the framework of these procedures, the rules of mathematical logic are absolute, indisputable, and unappealable, and the thinking that is busy with solving a special problem of computation of statements is bound to follow these rules to the letter. (Ilyenkov, 1979, pp. 136–137)

What Ilyenkov was trying to say in his evaluation of the role of formal logic in thinking is that the person who applies it would be limited to solving only a very narrow class of problems. Vladimir Porus objected to this view and indicated that the potential of formal logic had been understated by Ilyenkov:

Even though the process of cognition is a controversial one, the system of theoretical knowledge about it . . . should be free from formal logical contradictions. This requirement determines the main cause of development of modern logic, the search of non-contradictory means of analysis of gnoseological processes. (Porus, 1979, p. 170)

The opposition between the perspectives of Ilyenkov and Porus over the evaluation of formal logic and formal logical thinking is no coincidence. In fact, the former thinker considered that formal logic lacked any subject or semantic content, while Porus emphasized not only the formal but also the contentrelated aspects of this form of reasoning. Ilyenkov contrasted formal logic with dialectical logic, since, in his view, the latter dealt with content, or, more precisely, with the deployment of content.

* * * * *

Viewing dialectical logic as solely the logic of content allowed Andreev to state the following: “There are universal forms of thinking equally used by dialecticians, metaphysicians, and idealists” (Andreev, 1985, p. 254).

For all those authors who shared the same view, the very idea of the possibility of the formalization of dialectical logic and dialectical thinking was unacceptable. For instance, Ilyenkov wrote: “The attempts to improve the apparatus of dialectics by means of modern logic . . . were as unfeasible as efforts to obtain a hybrid from a cross between a rose and a fig” (Ilyenkov, 1979, p. 143). Porus (1979) expressed the same idea: “We believe that the attempts to present the complex dialectical process of development as a formal computation are doomed from the start” (p. 164). Kopnin (1962) also denied the very possibility of formalization of dialectical logic. He was convinced that rigid schemes would make dialectical logic useless for the cognitive activity of individuals (p. 61). Andreev agreed and pointed out that “dialectical logic cannot be formalized because of its nature” (Andreev, 1985, p. 151). The rejection of even the possibility of such formalization hampered the search for specifically dialectical, formal structures, relatively free from the content that represented them.

However, certain steps were taken in the direction of such search. The necessity to look for a new dialectical form was clearly expressed by Ilyenkov (1974):

The old logic, when facing the logical contradiction that it produced because of its strict following of its own principles, always backs off and retreats to the analysis of the previous move of thought. It tends to look for the error committed, to discover the inexactness that led to a contradiction. The latter, therefore, becomes an insurmountable obstacle in the way of the forward movement of thought, in the way of a particular analysis of the essence of a certain case. (p. 137)

Actually, in this abstract, Ilyenkov posed the question of the need to change the form of thinking because the previous, non-dialectical form generated contradictions—i.e., negation of itself. Maltsev (1964) noticed the same:

The contradictions of an incoherent speculation can be easily withdrawn by means of formal logic. But the contradictions that emerged in the analysis and because of facing the contradictions of the reality under study can only be resolved by spontaneous or deliberate use of dialectical logic. (p. 24)

* * * * *

The early history includes Stenkevich, Herzen, Belinsky, and others. Later us there is Plekhanov, countered by Bogdanov. Then Nikolai Podvoisky, and Losev. In our time Kopnin, Ilyenkov, Porus Kedrov, Mithrofan Alekseev, Andreev, Maltsev, Stolyarov (1975).

The balance of the essay, beginning with the section “Dialectical Thinking in Science”, is devoted to Vygotsky, at length. This could well be because of the volume’s preoccupation with psychology as well as Vygotsky’s manifest importance.

There is too much to summarize, so here is the bibliography:

References

Andreev, I.D. (1985). Dialectical logic. Moscow: High School.

Berdyaev, N.A. (2016). Dostoevsky’s world outlook. Moscow: High School.

Bogdanov, A.A. (1920). Philosophy of living experience. Popular essays. Materialism, empirio-criticism, dialectical materialism, empirio-monism, science of the future. Moscow: State Publisher House.

Dostoevsky, F.M. (1961). Teenager. Moscow: Fiction.

Herzen, A.I. (1982). Past and thoughts. Moscow: Fiction.

Ilyenkov, E.V. (1974). Dialectical logic. Moscow: Politizdat.

Ilyenkov, E.V. (1979). The problem of contradiction in logic. In Kedrov B.M.(Ed.). Dialectical contradiction (pp. 122–143). Moscow: Politizdat.

Kedrov, B.M. (1962). The subject of Marxist dialectical logic and its difference from the subject of formal logic. In Kedrov B.M.(Ed.). Dialectics and logic. Laws of thought (pp. 63–137). Moscow: USSR Academy of Sciences.

Kopnin, P.V. (1962). Dialectical logic and its relation to formal logic. In Kedrov B.M.(Ed.). Dialectics and Logic. Laws of thinking (pp. ЗЗ–62). Moscow: USSR Academy of Sciences.

Kopnin, P.V. (1973). Dialectics as logic and theory of knowledge. Moscow: Science. Lenin, V.I. (1980). In memory of Herzen. Moscow: Politizdat.

Losev, A.F. (1990). Philosophy of the name. Moscow: MSU.

Losev, A.F. (2016). Nikolai Kuzansky in translations and comments: In 2 volumes. Vol. 2. Moscow: YaSK.

Losev, A.F. (2023). Dialectics of myth. SPB: Azbuka-Attikus.

Maltsev, V.I. (1964). Essay on dialectical logic. Moscow: Moscow University Press.

Plekhanov, G.V. (1923). Essays on the history of materialism. Moscow: State Publisher House.

Podvoisky, N.I. (1980). Letters on dialectics. Problems of Philosophy, (3), 116–136.

Porus, V.N. (1979). Dialectical contradiction and the principle of reflection. In Kedrov B.M.(Ed.). Dialectical contradiction (pp. 156–179). Moscow: Politizdat.

Stolyarov, V.I. (1975). Dialectics as logic and methodology of science. Moscow: Politizdat.

Tulmin, S. (1981). Mozart in psychology. Questions of Philosophy, 10, 127–137.

Veraksa, N.E., & Samuelsson, I.P. (Eds.) (2022). Piaget and Vygotsky in XXI century. Discourse in early childhood education. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1982a). Problems of general psychology (including Thought and Language). Moscow: Pedagogy.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1982b). Problems of the theory and history of psychology. Moscow: Pedagogy.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1983a). The fundamental problems of defectology. Moscow: Pedagogy.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1983b). The problem of the development of higher mental functions. Moscow: Pedagogy.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1984a). Child psychology. Moscow: Pedagogy.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1984b). Scientific legacy. Moscow: Pedagogy.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1987). The psychology of art. Moscow: Pedagogy.

Mathematics & the Sciences

“Mathematics and Dialectic” by Sergey A. Zadadaev

The first part of this essay confounded me, because the examples of problem-solving adduced has no discernable connection to any serious conception of dialectic I could see. Once again we are in the realm of psychology, per finding multiple solutions to puzzles. Then apparently the author gets more serious by applying category theory to create formal models of ‘dialectical structures’, modeling types of transformation. I do not grasp this upon first perusal, but I think there is something fundamentally wrong with this point of departure, though I am interested in the relevance of category theory.

I turned to the essay “Nonlinear Quantum Physics and Dialectical Thinking” by José N. R. Croca. I am not competent to judge this alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation. I did find the characterization of a dialectic of locality and nonlocality interesting. I sense that something has gone astray in physics but I do not want to pile on the mountain of crackpot nonsense already in the public sphere.

References:

Bucur, I.A. (1968). Introduction to the theory of categories and functors. Wiley.

Veraksa N.E. (2006). Dialectical thinking. Vagant.

Veraksa N.E., Zadadaev S.A. (2005). Structural dialectical method of psychological analysis and its mathematical model. Dialectical teaching. Evrika, 35–51.

Zadadaev S.A. (2012). Methods of structural dialectic. Granitsa.

PART IV: Dialectical Thinking and the Future

I single out this concluding discussion because is overwhelmingly asinine, even for academia. It discredits the whole book. I am not going to bother to read Part II.2 and probably not Part III. The idea of their so-called dialectic reconciling oppositions is as dumb as the USA Democratic Party leadership reaching across the aisle. But as I shall elaborate later on, I have a problem even with the technical elaboration of dialectic. I wonder whether the discipline of psychology overall is as awful as this.

The Nature of Dialectical Thinking

Now I am going to enter Part I. 2, Perspectives on Dialectical Thinking, the first three essays of which get into the nuts and bolts of general dialectical conceptions, and also more into what I think is fundamentally missing in this volume as a whole.

4 “Dialectical Thinking and Structural Dialectical Analysis” by Nikolay E. Veraksa:

So, the focus here as in the volume overall is on development and transformation, with the notion of contradiction—often synonymous with opposition— as the linchpin. I find this conception superficial and certainly not the whole of dialectics, or even of its essence.

Following a quote from Vygotsky, Veraksa defines development. He distinguishes structure/form from content. The next section brings us to the meat of his argument: “Opposites as the Units of a Universal Dialectical Structure of Developing Content.” In the section after that, the author delves into different kinds of opposites, and here is where he develops a formal schema for characterizing them—transformation, integration, mediation, seriation, inversion, change of alternative, identification, closure, secondary mediation. The mathematical model is articulated with examples. I cannot delve into the specifics, but one example will serve as foil for my skepticism: the change of seasons mapped by this formalism strikes me as pointless, since seasons don’t really develop out of one another; they are products of Earth’s revolution around the Sun tilted on its axis, also in relation to Earth’s topography and atmosphere. This alone unintentionally illustrates what is fundamentally shallow about this project.

Veraksa almost recognizes this in the penultimate section, “Structural Dialectical Analysis and Dialectical Thinking”, where he distinguishes between the dialectical structure of an object and dialectical thinking, but I do not see anything illuminating there either.

I find all of this epistemologically flat, in that everything is modeled on the level of appearances, but if there are kernel traits that distinguish dialectics, they converge on delving beneath the structure of appearance to the ‘essence’ that generates the (ideologically deceptive) appearance. Deceptive appearances: you know, like defining the political universe according to the American two-party system or its allegedly fundamental opposition between liberals and conservatives.

Secondly, dialectics is not only about contradiction, let alone superficial opposition. Engels for all his gaffes recognizes, against Dühring, that theorizing any phenomenon is a process of analysis and synthesis. Analysis of a complex whole into interrelated parts is also dialectical, but does not always involve contradiction. (Even Marx made this mistake a couple of times in passing.) But of course the most interesting cases are those which incite paradoxical thinking, and also, those which involve penetrating the delusive structure of appearances. For all the preoccupation with change, development, transformation, most of this book comes off as one or two-dimensional.

One final note about approaches to dialectics—Adorno. He has his own peculiar limitations, as it seems to me he determinantly negated only other philosophers, but the outstanding feature of negative dialectics, which in my estimation cannot accomplish everything, is that, theoretically, the means to escape reification is to delineate and reveal a structure that is finally seen to be erroneous and superseded and thus for a conscious person to conceptually quarantine it, that is, to define what one is no longer deluded by. I have not seen anything like this in this entire volume so far.

5 “Dialectical Thinking as a Post-Formal Organization of Human Thought and Action” by Michael Basseches:

The author studies “dialectical thinking” as a developmental psychological phenomenon’, rather than as a phenomenon in intellectual history, in comparison with Piaget. There is a whole section on Piaget, with reference to Piaget’s repulsion of Kant’s assumptions. Kopnin and Piaget’s later grappling with dialectics are mentioned. Basseches’ work has an entirely different provenance from the Soviet/Russian work.

There is a whole section on Klaus Riegel. For reasons I cannot remember, I could not stand Riegel 45 years ago. My understanding was rather primitive and my view of dialecttics more limited back then, but perhaps I was skeptical of the formulation of ‘dialectical operations’. I am pretty sure I rejected simplistic formulations that most of us have been exposed to.

On to the author’s own conceptualization:

Within a neo-Piagetian framework, I understood dialectical thinking to be a “post-formal” psychological phenomenon. By this I meant 1) that dialectical thinking could both make use of the power and value of formal analyses based on closed-system models while at the same time being able to articulate the limits of formal analyses and transcend those limits; 2) that dialectical thinking included conceptualizing the construction of useful closed-system models as moments within larger processes of contradiction and transformation—differentiation and integration; 3) that, ontogenetically, dialectical thinking was a successor to formal operational thinking, formed by bringing together the capacity for formal operational thinking (developed through experience with closed-system analyses) with recognition of the limits of formal operational thinking (developed through encounters with challenges, both material and conceptual, which closed-system analyses were inadequate to address).

Basseches describes and recounts his research methodology. Table 5.1 —The Dialectical Schemata Framework —presents an extensive set of bullet points of the various elements of dialectical thinking. This looks promising. In the subsequent section he defines dialectic: “Dialectic is developmental transformation (i.e., developmental movement through forms) which occurs via constitutive and interactive relationships.” He attempts to explain this via the “reproductive activity of pupfish”, but I am lost here.

In the next section he purports to “address both the differentiation of dialectical analyses from formal analyses and the integration of formal analyses within dialectical analyses.” I am having trouble digesting this, but I don’t blame the author. He then discusses the dialectical thinkers Marx and Kuhn who purportedly provided alternatives to formal analyses. He adduces other examples of standoff struggles between formalists and relativists. Dialectical thinking is counterpoised to both. The examples given are not impressive.

The next section is “Integrating Russian and Neo-Piagetian Traditions in the Study of Dialectical Thinking.” Along the way Riegel’s ‘correction’ of Piaget is addressed. Here and in the subsequent section the relation of form and content is treated. The notion of alienation also figures into this essay. It is a blur to me, but perhaps there is something substantial here. In conclusion, the author views dialectics as a living historical tradition to which he asserts no final conception. The bibliography is quite varied in the thinkers it draws on.

6 “Internal Relations as the Basis of Dialectics” by Thomas R. Bidell:

This is the sole essay so far that delves with any seriousness into what dialectics is, beyond the banal view of dialectics as change, process, and development assumed everywhere else in the book. Bidell is explicit about the inadequacy of such a conception. He cites Hegel and Lenin against empty schematism. He reinterprets Engels’ positing of three dialectical laws in terms of what they point to on a deeper level. Bidell provides a basic explanation of Hegel’s dialectics and examines it from the conceptual standpoint of internal relations. Aufheben, badly translated and not clearly understood in the anglophone world, is explained as central to Hegel’s dialectic which itself challenges Kant’s rigid and externally related categories. Key to dialectic is the “unity of opposed determinations”. Bidell also challenges the usual formula of the relation between Marx and Hegel.

Bidell also aims to rescue internal relations from Bradley and the British idealists, and especially the damage done by Bertrand Russell.

Bidell cites his fellow authors Michael Basseches and Michael Mascolo as proponents of an exemplary intersubjective psychotherapeutic model. Following that Bodell examines the developmental theories of Susan Carey and Piaget. Carey fails from the standpoint of internal relations, while Piaget passes the test of a genuinely dialectical theory.

As Bidell delves into the essential nature of dialectics, as others fail to do, I have some respect for this essay. I know that Bertell Ollman is an advocate of internal relations, I don’t know who else is. I don’t recall much discussion of internal relations with Bertell. I only recall him once saying to me: “Abstraction! It should be bottled like perfume.”

11, 19-21 October 2024. Edited & uploaded 10 November 2024

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Handbook of Pseudo-Dialectical Thinking: A Partial Review