F.E.D. Dialectics: THE USES OF DIALECTIC. -- Part 12: Quoting Seldon Series.

THE USES OF DIALECTIC.

-- Part 12: Quoting Seldon Series.

Dear Reader,

It is my pleasure, and my honor, as an elected member of the Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.] General Council, and as a voting member of F.E.D., to share, with you, from time to time, as they are approved for public release by the F.E.D. General Council, key excerpts from the internal writings, and from the internal sayings, of our co-founder, Karl Seldon.

This 12th release of this new such series is posted below [Some E.D. standard edits have been applied, in the version presented below, by the editors of the F.E.D. Special Council for the Encyclopedia, to the direct transcript of our co-founder’s discourse].

In this 12th installment, Seldon provides a brief and more widely accessible introductory overview of the Domain of dialectic.

Seldon –

“Dialectic is more categorial, whereas formal logic is more propositional.”

“Formal logic is more “formal”, or form-only, abstracting from content, whereas dialectical logic is more ‘contental’ – more concerned with the qualitatively different kinds [of things] that inhere in a given Domain, or field of human knowledge, during a given stage in that Domain's development.”

“The categories that dialectic uses are, in part, taxonomic. That is, those categories classify all of the kinds of things that exist in a given Domain at a given stage in that Domain’s history.”

“But the dialectical categories that characterize a given Domain are also all interrelated. One dialectic category leads on into the next. The dialectic categories of a given Domain in a given stage in the development of that Domain form a kind of “genealogy”.”

“This categorial logic, or pattern of categorial followership, as to how each successor dialectic category follows from or is begotten by its predecessor dialectic category, is the key to all of the uses of dialectic.”

“But it requires the user of dialectic to discover the starting category for a categories-progression that parades all of the kinds categories that inhere in the given Domain in their inherent order.”

“That starting category is that dialectic category of the given Domain that has successor dialectic categories, but that has no predecessor dialectic category per that inherent order.”

“There are two kinds of dialectic that are better known widely at present, and, correspondingly, two basic kinds of starting categories, one for systematic dialectic, one for historical dialectic.”

“Dialectic itself forms a categorial Domain in its own right.”

“The category of systematic dialectic is the starting category for the dialectic Domain.”

“The category of historical dialectic is the second category of the categorial progression for the dialectic Domain, a co-existing but supplementary and opposite category to the category of systematic dialectic.”

“The third category of the dialectic Domain represents the hybridization, or dialectic synthesis, of the first two kinds of dialectic.”

“The fourth category of the dialectic Domain represents an additional kind of dialectic, supplementary to, and opposing, all of the three predecessor kinds of dialectic.”

“Below we describe only the first two kinds of dialectic.”

“With a systematic dialectic for a given Domain, the starting category works if it represents the simplest kind of things that inhere in that Domain.”

“Systematic dialectic abstracts from history, by focusing on the/a present “slice” or “cross-section” of the history of the given Domain, “thin” enough so that the historical changes within that “slice” are minimized.”

“Systematic dialectic enables you to present that present of that Domain in “systematic” order, that is, in a progression of dialectic categories, starting from the simplest category inherent in that Domain, step-by-step, category-by-category, each successor category a bit richer and more complex than its predecessor category, until the richest and most complex category and kind inhering in that present of that Domain is reached and presented.”

“Such systematic presentations of the kind-phenomena of a given Domain have pedagogical value, precisely because their starting category, presented first, represents the simplest kind of things in that Domain. Complexity accrues stepwise, in small increments, from that, simplest starting point.”

“With an historical dialectic, the category representing the chronologically earliest known kind of things inhering in, and inaugurating, the given Domain is the starting category.”

“The order of the kinds-of-things dialectic categories is the chronological order in which each successive kind first arose in the history of that Domain.”

“An historical-dialectical model of a Domain describes which combinations of earlier-born things-kinds created the chronologically later-born things-kinds, and thus, justifies the dialectic categories that represent those kinds of things.”

“With an historical dialectic one can reconstruct the past kinds-history of a given Domain, from past/origin to present.”

“The dialectic recipe does not “forget” or leave out any of the various possible combinations of predecessor kinds that can generate successor kinds and their dialectic categories, as theorizers often do, if unaided by such a combinatoric recipe, or “check list”.”

“That recipe can also construct category symbols for kinds-combinations that have not yet appeared.”

“One may thereby be able to ‘pre-construct’, symbolically, or to “predict”, future kinds-content of the given Domain – if one is able to interpret the meanings of the category symbols that the dialectic recipe, called the ‘Dialectic Function’, generates when that recipe is extended beyond the presently known kinds-content of that Domain.”

“Such glimpses of a Domain’s future may enable conscious improvement of present human conduct regarding that Domain in question.”

For more information regarding these Seldonian insights, please see --

www.dialectics.info

For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian insights -- specimens of ‘dialectical art’ – as well as dialectically-illustrated books by the F.E.D. Press, see --