Publication Details

Abstract

The study deals with the question of the development of perception of reality from the viewpoint of the three laws of dialectics — unity and struggle of contraries “antitheses“# negation of negation and passage from quantity to quality. In the author’s view, these laws cannot be a mere reflection of objective dialectics in the subject as is still being expounded in Marxism to this day, for if dialectics are the whole reality to which belongs also perception, then they must be part of the immanent subjective dialectics which direct unconsciously the development of perception from its beginning. Dialectics of the development of perception are, before all else, dialectics of the development of thinking, of scientific hypotheses. Hypothesis affirms something about reality in the hope of its being in agreement with the latter, yet, as becomes evident in time, it actually agreed only with a certain experience. It cannot explain new facts, and turns into error. It embodied this error potentially within itself in that it went beyond its experience and wished to be in agreement with reality with which no hypothesis can agree. Error into which it turned, leads to the installment of a new hypothesis which in turn meets wiwth the same fate. Hypothesis and error, position and negation, are thus a specific form of unity and struggle of contraries in the dialectics of the development of cognition. This development proceeds futher in the form of negation of one hypothesis by another, the second by the third, and so on, that is, by a series of negations of negations. However, as the author demonstrates on several examples, the Hegelian form of this procedure, viz, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, i. e. repetition of thesis in synthesis ‘at a higher plane', is not the only one at all, but only an exceptional form of this chain of negations. Exceptionally, the law of passage from quantity to quality also finds its application here. Since one contradictory fact renders the hypothesis fallible, we do not pass, for instance, from a general judgment to a partial one only after an accumulation of several contradictions, but do so immediately following the first negative verification. The application of this law in the development of thinking may be spoken of in only a very restricted number of cases. All this dialectic proceeds through the intermediary of formal logic which is its superior.