The scientific and technological revolution has proved to be a serious test not only for some general and special scientific theories, but also for many philosophical schools and trends concerned in one way or another with the scientific explanation of the world. Positivist philosophy which pulled through many difficult periods in the course of its long history has evidently entered a new critical stage in its evolution. The general crisis of positivism started, in effect, with the emergence of Marxist philosophy, its first real alternative, and has been aggravating ever since. It became particularly acute at the turn of the 20th century in connection with major discoveries in physics, mathematics and philosophy, summed up by Lenin. New trials awaited positivism in the 1920s as a result of the emergence of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. No less troublesome were the subsequent periods of its evolution. All the storms positivism had to weather resulted, as a rule, in partial modifications of its philosophical programme which took into account the criticism of its opponents, including Marxist philosophy.

It is noteworthy that the representatives of positivism attributed all these misfortunes of their philosophy not to its intrinsic weaknesses or to their own fallacies, but regarded them as symptoms of a crisis of science in general. Moreover, all blame for setbacks and difficulties in scientific cognition they usually laid at the door of either materialism or dialectics. The strategy and the tactics of positivism fighting for its prestige in the scientific community evidently deserves special analysis which goes beyond the scope of our investigation. What we do need to emphasise here is the fact that it is not some particulars of the programme of positivism that are called in question by the current scientific and technological revolution, but the very foundation of positivist philosophy. In point of fact, the revolution has completely undermined the scientists’ confidence in the basic methodological principles of positivism—empiricism, conventionalism, indeterminism, the reduction of philosophy to the logic of science and to linguistic analysis, etc.

The crisis of positivist philosophy manifests itself not only in the disagreement with science and its main tendencies but also in the emergence of new schools and trends within the philosophy of science coming out with sharp criticism of some positivist dogmas and proposing methodological alternatives to its traditions.

The Western philosophy of science does not know a more radical critic of empiricism than Karl Popper. “Critical rationalism” as the methodological platform of Popper and his adherents does appear to be rather a formidable opponent of positivism. Its model of scientific cognition is essentially different from the positivist model, particularly if we take into account the views expounded in the latest works of the English philosopher: the recognition of theory as the most essential component of scientific knowledge, the deductive system of reasoning (from a problem to a surmise, from the surmise as a tentative solution of the problem to consequences, from the consequences implied by a hypothesis to their purpose-oriented refutation, from this to a new formulation of the problem, and so on). Nevertheless, despite the apparent distinctions from the inductivist model defended by positivism there is striking resemblance between the two models: both of them postulate direct and simple connection between empirical knowledge and theory and assert .the conventional character of basic empirical statements, if not laws themselves.

Another characteristic feature of Popper’s stand which seemingly distinguishes it from the positivist views is the recognition of the so-called World 3 or the world of objective knowledge. It is very significant, however, that Popper does not relate this world to objective reality, relying, like the positivists, on the intersubjective criterion of scientificity. His idea of “objective knowledge” borders on the idealism of the Platonic, if not Berkeleian, type.

“Critical rationalism” also differs from positivism in that it revives the principle of causality and shows special interest in the explanatory role of scientific theories. Yet even this difference is watered down by interpreting necessity implied by causal explanations in the purely logical sense a la Wittgenstein. The “theory of regularity” adhered to by Wittgenstein in relation to the problems of causality and determinism is obviously rooted in the philosophy of Hume and Kant and shows close affinity to the Machist concept of causality as probability of the expectation of consequences, as well as to the interpretation of law as functional dependence expressed by a mathematical formula.

Besides the highly critical attitude to empiricism in the modern philosophy of science, the opposition to positivism also manifests itself in the understanding of the subject-matter of philosophy. In this field the debates are mainly centred on the status of the so-called metaphysical problems. “Critical rationalism” does not go beyond the general legalisation of such problems though they were implicitly recognised in positivist dogmata, whereas “scientific realism”, “new ontology” and “new metaphysics”, which have formed within the framework of the modern philosophy of science as alternatives to positivism, place special emphasis on the need for the restoration of metaphysics reduced to ashes during the anti-metaphysical crusade of positivism and make this issue one of the key points of their programmes.

As a matter of fact, the programme of “scientific realism” boils down to the rebuilding of the scientific structure of the real world—the task considered to be worthy of philosophy. Very characteristic in this respect are the general scientific concepts and metatheoretical problems which receive extensive coverage in the works of this school’s representatives. They indeed regard their task in terms of resurrection. One gets an impression that scientific realism is completely unaware of the age-old traditions in the investigation of these problems and ignorant of the dialectics of nature and social development expounded in Marxist-Leninist philosophy which has never lost interest in such problems as being, the structure of matter, the interconnection of space and time, the forms of motion, the laws of the development of material systems, including society, and carried out fruitful investigations into the philosophical problems of natural science, social progress, etc. The attitude of the Western philosophy of science to these and many other problems is indicative of its confinement within the narrow limits of positivist traditions.

Of course, attempts to start from scratch ought to meet with sympathy and it would be hardly fair to demand of “scientific realism”, “scientific materialism”, “new ontology”, etc. that they consider these problems within the framework of more general philosophical issues and substantiate the new ontology with dialectical and epistemological analysis. However, any attempt to develop a sound ontology today without fulfilling this requirement is inevitably doomed to failure. Moreover, an ontology constructed on a tabula rasa basis tends to reproduce in a crude manner some ideas and concepts of old natural philosophy gravitating towards mechanicism, speculativeness, the Laplatian ideal of determinism, etc. It would fail to rise to the level of universal, truly philosophical generalisations and only strive to replace them by a more or less coherent system of general scientific statements. Such statements based either on biological and cybernetic ideas, or on the set theory and the latest achievements of physics would inevitably lose their concreteness and degenerate into truisms leaving at the same time a lot of loopholes for idealism—the more so as they are intended to deduce the world from current scientific concepts and tend on the whole to petrify the present-day knowledge rather than to give a dynamic picture of living reality on the basis of a truly philosophical approach. Consciousness, too, with all its specificity and richness of content is deduced from (or reduced to) the interaction of molecules and atoms, whereas the mechanism of heredity in living organisms is viewed in terms of quantum transitions. The tabula rasa approach of new metaphysics to the problem of ontology will hardly enable the philosophy of science to raise the edifice of new methodology above ground level in the place of the ruins left by positivism. All attempts to revive ontology as a doctrine of the objective world and its most general properties and laws will at best remind one of a recapitulation course of history unless their authors turn in earnest to Marxist-Leninist philosophy, to the achievements of modern materialism that has assimilated all that was best and most progressive in the history of science and culture.

It is for this reason that we set ourselves the task of familiarising the reader with some principles of Marxist philosophy, showing the essence of dialectical materialism as an alternative to positivism and considering possible solutions to the present-day pivotal problems of methodology. It would be presumptuous to claim a more or less complete exposition of the views of the classics and modern Soviet philosophers in this book, not to speak of the elucidation of all the problems that have been touched upon in its polemical sections. The author has only singled out a few most acute problems which have become of late the object of particularly heated controversies and which have not yet been subjected to a sufficiently detailed analysis in Marxist literature with due regard for the nuances brought in the limelight.

As regards the positive content of this book, we attach special importance to the problems of the scientific value of philosophy and of the concreteness of philosophical knowledge which are closely connected with each other. In Marxist philosophy concrete knowledge has always been associated with the completeness of the reflection of objects and their diverse relations and links with one another. Conversely, the abstract has been regarded as an equivalent of isolation, particularisation. Any statement represents a dialectical unity of both opposites, therefore there are no and cannot be any absolutely abstract or absolutely concrete scientific statements. Any scientific knowledge can only be more abstract or less abstract. Regarding scientific cognition as a living process unfolding in time and space we maintain that this completeness of the reflection of links and relations is different at different stages of scientific investigation. Hence, we distinguish three different levels or forms of concreteness: -empirical, representing direct, sensual perception of objects and phenomena; theoretical, concerned with inner laws, essential links, relations and necessary features; and philosophical, relating to the most general properties and phenomena of reality, the contradictoriness of development, the diversity and the unity of quality and quantity, the material and the ideal, etc., as they are reflected in the human mind.

Real philosophical knowledge reflects certain universal properties of the sensually perceived world and is in this sense empirically concrete. It reveals the most general laws and relationships of the surrounding world and is therefore theoretically concrete. As distinct from the knowledge provided by special sciences it also defines the epistemological limits for the solution of one or another problem, i.e. the concrete form of the relation between the objective and the subjective in scientific cognition and, consequently, is epistemologically concrete. In point of fact, philosophical knowledge can only be concrete if it takes into account the place of a given phenomenon or the property it reflects in the general system of categories and laws of dialectics and materialism. Concreteness is demanded by Marxist philosophy of itself in the first place. The concepts of matter and consciousness are only regarded as concrete (and therefore really scientific) within the framework of the basic question of philosophy. The category of contradiction can only be concrete if it is viewed in the context of the unity of the phenomena under consideration. Dialectics rejects such notions as the opposition in general, quality in general, essence in general, necessity in general, etc. regarded as absolute entities. It demands that the opposites be only considered within the framework of unity, quality in relation to a given quantity, matter in relation to consciousness as its derivative, necessity in relation to chance, etc. Outside this philosophical concreteness the categories of dialectics and materialism become nonsensical. The concreteness of these categories is the main proof of their scientificity.

The specific form of concreteness of philosophical knowledge determines also its relation to the knowledge provided by special sciences. Philosophy does not stand aloof from them, it merges with the entire system of human knowledge and actively penetrates all the cells of this living intellectual organism. Conversely, no special scientific knowledge could be fully concrete without the support of philosophy, as positive sciences do not concern themselves with quantity and quality, matter and consciousness, the opposites in objects and phenomena, etc. It hardly needs mentioning that no truly scientific analysis would be possible under such conditions.

Possessing its own form of concreteness, philosophical knowledge performs not only the methodological, but also the theoretical function in the development of science. It is not something alien to special scientific knowledge, but makes part and parcel of its system. It stands to reason that philosophical knowledge integrated in the structure of human thought usually loses its independent meaning or, at any rate, remains in the background—it serves the purposes of a special scientific investigation or some practical action and is entirely subordinated to it. This inconspicuousness of philosophical knowledge sometimes gives grounds for erroneous assertions that a well-developed theory has no place for philosophy at all.

The history of science shows how philosophical principles and laws rise up in all their magnitude and reveal their power and viability in critical periods, at the crossroads of scientific cognition, when it becomes necessary to solve crucial problems of social and scientific development. Fundamental, theoretical sciences find themselves much more often confronted with such large-scale problems than do empirical or applied sciences, and it is usually fundamental theories that throw a new light on conventional, generally recognised philosophical principles. Hence, the cooperation between philosophy and special sciences is particularly fruitful in the sphere of theory. The attitude of theorists to philosophy is reverent and critical at the same time. T-heir relations based on mutual confidence leave no room for parochialism and, consequently, for petty squabbles over their share in the success of a scientific investigation or, conversely, their measure of responsibility in case of its failure. Here we have a single science whose only aim untarnished by any prestige considerations is to serve mankind.

The question of the objectivity of knowledge assumes different forms and requires different solutions depending on the context. Philosophy provides the most general solution: everything that exists outside the mind (be it individual or collective) is objective. Special sciences view the problem from a different angle striving to “eliminate the subject” from the results of a scientific investigation. Empirical investigation does not know a more reliable means for obtaining objective knowledge than an experiment ensuring the investigator’s “neutrality”. Theoretical investigation, in our opinion, pivots on the principle of invariance. In the theorist’s language the objective “in the first approximation” is equivalent to what is invariant in different systems of transformation. A natural scientist (a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, etc.) shows but little interest in the problem of objectivity in its “pure”, philosophical form, considering it even too trivial (as is evidenced from numerous publications and verbal statements). His attitude changes when the problem comes to the foreground, e.g. when the former criteria of invariance fail, generally recognised theories collapse and the scientists need a reliable bridge to a new theory.

Dialectics does not regard objective knowledge as a challenge prize which passes on from one generation to another. Objective knowledge must be gained by and for each generation of scientists separately and may only come as a result of their own labour. It should be extracted from the rock of subjective assessments, suppositions and delusions just like precious metal is extracted from ore. It is procured in arduous toil—only to be rejected there and then and give way to more profound concepts and theories.

In its approach to the problem of objective knowledge dialectical methodology is characterised, first and foremost, by its constant striving to reflect all the complexity and dynamism of scientific cognition avoiding any one-sidedness and absolutisation of some particular methods or levels of cognition. At the same time it firmly adheres to the principle of objectivity in its most general, philosophical sense, since the disregard of this principle leads to the erosion and devaluation of the entire system of scientific knowledge.

To be sure, the concrete embodiment of the principles of dialectics offered by one or another scientist in his works may lack the necessary flexibility, completeness or consistency. The blame for subjective weaknesses should not be laid at the door of dialectics itself. It provides a sound basis for the solution of problems facing modern science, the more so as it calls for creative approach to its own development.