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Where should I start when it comes to learning dialectics? (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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[–] 4 points 22 hours ago (6 children)

Since dialectical materialism is meant to be predictive, doesn't that make it falsifiable?

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  • [–] 1 point 22 hours ago (5 children)

    Christianity also attempts to explain natural phenomena and give predictive capabilities, but there's no evidence it actually does have predictive capabilities. I similarly don't think it's possible to produce evidence that dialectical materialism gives better predictive capabilities than mechanistic materialism.

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  • [–] 6 points 22 hours ago (4 children)

    I don't see why it isn't? Make predictions with dialectical materialism and with mechanistic materialism, and then see which predictions were better.

    The problem with Christianity is that the predictions it attempts to make are usually wrong.

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  • [–] 1 point 22 hours ago (3 children)

    Make predictions with dialectical materialism and with mechanistic materialism, and then see which predictions were better

    I'm in no position to quantitatively judge this by myself so, until presented with evidence that dialectical materialism objectively gives better predictive capabilities, I don't have any reason to study it.

    The problem with Christianity is that the predictions it attempts to make are usually wrong

    Well, yes, that was my point. I don't necessarily believe dialectical materialism is intrinsically better than mechanistic materialism.

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  • [–] 4 points 22 hours ago* (2 children)

    Okay, but you can study the way dialectical materialism makes falsifiable claims, because it claims to be predictive. Whether you feel like studying it or not is unrelated to the original claim.

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  • [–] 1 point 22 hours ago (1 child)

    My point is that I don't think there's existing evidence as of today of it being better, so I would discard it until then as it's a more complex abstraction from simpler materialism

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  • [–] 5 points 21 hours ago

    That's a different point. Your original point was that it was unfalsifiable, but since it's predictive and used in historical analysis it plainly isn't. It makes claims about the movement of history and we can check them against the actual movement of history; the existing evidence would be the already existing historical record.

    I don't really know how you'd use simple materialism to predict most historical events.

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