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p Science, because its purpose is discovery of the unknown, is organically involved in combating error, as well as the prejudices and illusions of everyday consciousness. Anyone can adopt a pose of unshakeable impartiality, wave aside all polemics and spend his time spouting platitudes; but it is quite impossible for him or anyone else, in any field of knowledge, to say something new without the spur of passion and partiality.

p Polemics, of course, can never be the aim of scientific inquiry and one can understand the scientist who disapproves of them on the ground that they obstruct calm and thorough research. But polemics or no, there is bound to be controversy. And the scientist who insists that scientific propositions should be systematically developed rather than polemically expounded in no way eliminates the inner polemical nature of his inquiry. His statements, assuming them to be original, question the statements of other scientists; his discoveries contradict certain established views or conflict with everyday notions that have 410 no basis in scientific fact. The theory of relativity, no matter how it is expounded, is bound to be at odds with the belief in the unlimited universality of the laws of classical mechanics. Thus, the inner polemic of science is only reasserted with all the more force by the absence of its outward form. Much though we may desire it, we can never avoid the essential controversy, though we may discard some of the trimmings that prevent us from treating the subject systematically. It may well be asked, then, whether polemics (in the widest sense of the term), which are always to be found in the history of any science, are not the necessary form of development of scientific knowledge.

p Lenin’s teaching on the epistemological roots of idealism may also be regarded as an inquiry into the epistemological sources of all (i.e., not only idealist) error and, what is more, an inseparable part of scientific epistemology which reveals the path from ignorance to knowledge, and from one level of knowledge to another that is more profound. The epistemology, the theory of knowledge, of dialectical materialism differs qualitatively from the psychological study of cognition, which considers the individual’s capacity to know within certain inevitable limits, restrictions, etc. Marxist epistemology studies the development of knowledge, whose subject, whose creator, is not any one individual but all mankind. For this reason it examines not psychological but epistemological sources of error, error that arises out of the very nature of knowledge and its development.

p In arguing the principle of the unlimited knowability of the world, scientific epistemology gives a dialectical interpretation of the law-governed 411 “finitude" of all knowledge. This “finitude” of knowledge is overcome by its development, but always within historically determined limits. This means that the ability of cognition to produce absolute truths does not do away with the relativity of knowledge at any stage of its development. The reflection of reality—in concepts, notions and sensations—is at the same time their distortion, which is “removed” at a subsequent stage by the development of knowledge, not, of course, in absolute terms but in the relative sense. "We cannot,” Lenin wrote, "imagine, express, measure, depict movement, without interrupting continuity, without simplifying, coarsening, dismembering, strangling that which is living. The representation of movement by means of thought always makes coarse, kills,—and not only by means of thought, but also by sense– perception, and not only of movement, but every concept.

p “And in that lies the essence of dialectics.

p “And precisely this essence is expressed by the formula: the unity, identity of opposites.”  [411•1  Agnosticism and intuitionism elevate this one-sidedness, this subjectivity—which are real elements in the cognitive process—to the status of absolutes, endowing them with a fateful omnipotence. But the history of science gives no grounds for such an “oversimplified” judgement, which, incidentally, is also a positive element in the process of cognition-

p This process, as Lenin emphasises, is essentially contradictory. It is this that makes cognition possible, but it necessarily entails the possibility of error. From the subjective standpoint, that is to 412 say, from the standpoint of the individual knower, error is something accidental. But if we comprehend the history of cognition and try to extract the statistical regularity of errors, it becomes obvious that they are inevitable. This means that the dialectical opposition between truth and error unfolds within the sphere of the scientific reflection of the world, and not on its fringe.  [412•1  "In every science,” says Engels, "incorrect notions are, in the last resort, apart from errors of observation, incorrect notions of correct facts. The latter remain even when the former are shown to be false."  [412•2  It follows then that error, if it arises in the process of cognition, also has a certain significance. Where truth is abstractly, metaphysically counterposed to error, truth itself is interpreted abstractly and metaphysically, that is to say, comes near to error. And vice versa, concrete analysis of error enables us to detect its moments of objective truth.

p This dialectical principle of the relative opposition between truth and error has nothing to do with the unprincipled demand for toleration of error. Truth is irreconcilably opposed to error or compromise with error, and the realisation of this fact is a noble stimulus in any scientific polemic. But dialectically understood truth is self– 413 critical and implies an awareness of its own incompleteness, limitedness and need for development.

p The relativists’ blurring of the opposition between truth and error is profoundly anti– dialectical. The dialectical-materialist recognition of the objectivity of truth rules out the subjectivity inherent in relativism. However, objective truth is not objective reality, but only its approximately true reflection. The limits of the objectivity of truth are revealed by research, practice, and the theoretical analysis of practice. This means that the true is separated from the untrue, that is to say, the opposition between truth and error is firmly fixed within the framework of a certain field of research.

p Engels says, "Truth and error, like all thoughtconcepts which move in polar opposites, have absolute validity only in an extremely limited field... and if we attempt to apply it (such a concept— T.O.) as absolutely valid outside that field we really find ourselves altogether beaten: both poles of the antithesis become transformed into their opposites, truth becomes error and error truth."  [413•1  Developing this and other propositions of Engels, Lenin stressed that the limits of every absolute truth are relative, in view of which its opposition to relative truth is also relative. This scientific understanding of the epistemological nature of truth reveals the source of any genuine scientific dispute, which is essential not only in cases where truth is opposed by mistaken views, but also where the disputants agree as to the relative truth of the propositions under discussion, but regard truths not as permanently stamped coins meant 414 only for use but as the process of development of knowledge, which provides the ground for wide-ranging scientific discussion between people of like mind.

p Nor can the relativity of the opposition between truth and error be removed by practice which, although it is a criterion of truth, is also a process, that is, something historically limited, which overcomes its limitations but only to a certain extent, and not once and for all. It is understandable, then, why Lenin came out against the absolutising of practice (as of truth), because such “practice”, applied to the theory of knowledge, is bound to lead to subjectivism of the pragmatic variety or to dogmatism: "the criterion of practice can never, in the nature of things, either confirm or refute any human idea completely. This criterion too is sufficiently ‘indefinite’ not to allow human knowledge to become ‘absolute’, but at the same time it is sufficiently definite to wage a ruthless fight on all varieties of idealism and agnosticism.”  [414•1 

p So the oversimplified understanding of the dialectical opposition between truth and error, theory and practice, may lead, on the one hand, to underestimation of objective truth and the epistemological significance of practice, and on the other, to metaphysical perpetuation of the limited significance of any given truth and given, historically concrete practice. Lenin constantly warned against the danger from both directions, and stressed the creative character of scientific cognition, with which the objective necessity for scientific dispute is organically connected as a specific form of the development of cognition.

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p The stating of a fact and its most scrupulous and minute description does not by any means produce an absolute truth, because the fact is only a case which has to be investigated from the standpoint of its determining conditions, relationships, and so on. The truth of a fact is bound to have certain preconditions which, if ignored, make it impossible to draw a line between appearance and essence. Appearance, as we know, is no less a fact than essence. Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. This statement may be an absolute truth if we take into consideration all the conditions in which the given process occurs; but many of these conditions (the small amount of heavy water in ordinary water, for instance) were until recently unknown, while others may well be unknown to this day. Of course, the fact remains that water boils at 100°C., but the aforesaid circumstances make it dependent on other facts. We may state that, depending on an indefinite number of circumstances (internal and external), water may boil at various temperatures. It is obvious, however, that the boiling point of water must be fixed within certain limits, because this process cannot, after all, take place under any conditions.

p The empirical statement implies a concealed interpretation or at least the possibility of such an interpretation. We know, for instance, that pure metals produced under laboratory or industrial conditions possess properties markedly different from those that they possess in their “impure” form. But pure metals do not exist in nature, although it is their inherent properties that most fully express the specific nature of the given element. Thus, the mere citing of facts, the appeal to the obvious confirmed by experience, does not always put an end to the argument.

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p As we know, the properties of some substances are in a certain non-apparent dependence on others. Einstein proved that the trajectory of a moving body does not exist by itself (or "in itself”), that is, without relation to the system in which the body is moving. Can we not draw epistemological conclusions from this that would be applicable also to other properties and peculiarities of phenomena, inasmuch as they condition one another?

p The properties and qualities that appear to be directly inherent in a certain object are in reality (like the object itself, incidentally) the result of the interaction that occurs in the process of development, the investigation of which presupposes knowledge of the separate interacting parties, knowledge of the fact that these parties are what they are because of the interaction and not independently of it, and finally knowledge of the process of interaction itself as a dynamic whole, which is partly a precondition and partly a result of the process under investigation. The complexity of this objectively occurring process conceals all kinds of possibilities of error that are “realised” in the process of cognition, despite the fact that its immediate goal and final result is the truth and only the truth. Engels writes in the Dialectics of Nature, "The reciprocal action excludes any absolute primary or absolute secondary; but it is just as much a double-sided process which from its very nature can be regarded from two different standpoints; to be understood in its totality it must even be investigated from both standpoints one after the other, before the total results can be arrived at. If, however, we adhere one-sidedly to a single standpoint as the absolute one in contrast to the other, or if we arbitrarily 417 jump from one to the other according to the momentary needs of our argument, we shall remain entangled in the one-sidedness of metaphysical thinking; the inter-connection escapes us and we become involved in one contradiction after another.”  [417•1 

p In the process of cognition we have constantly to single out separate phenomena and subject them to more or less isolated examination without which we cannot discover what definite qualities and quantities they possess. The ancient philosophers were not as a rule aware of this epistemological necessity. They were content to acknowledge the universal connection and reciprocal conditionality of phenomena, and this dialectical (but naively dialectical and therefore unscientific) approach inevitably led to the identifying of qualitatively different things and processes, that is to say, to error. However, in the cognitive act of singling out the separate, and examining this separate thing in isolation from everything else, although it eliminates the errors of the ancient dialecticians, there lurks the danger of another kind of error, the metaphysical error which, as we know, the sciences (and philosophy as well) were unable to avoid for many centuries. Such errors were overcome in the past and are overcome in the present only by the dialectical inclusion of the separately investigated phenomenon in the system of relationships that have made it what it is, that is to say, the given, particular object constituting an element in a certain system.

p Thus, the cognitive process must comprise opposite but equally necessary logical operations, each of which is inevitably one-sided. One approach to 418 the phenomena under investigation prevails at one stage of cognition, and at another stage, the other approach. This objective structure of the cognitive process, its inevitable contradictoriness, naturally gives rise not only to errors, but also to polemics between scientists, who are everywhere found to be defending correct but limited, onesided views.

p Natural science outgrows the limits of predominantly empirical one-sided investigation, observation and description and thus becomes a theory based on scientific abstractions on an ever higher level and of ever increasing complexity. This leads more and more often to clashes between opposing scientific views that seek to embrace constantly expanding fields of research. Directly observed facts, individual experiments and so on are no longer sufficient to solve the questions raised in such theoretical discussions. Wilhelm Wundt in his day noted this tendency for controversial questions to multiply in the course of the development of theoretical natural science. Wundt took the view that physicists, physiologists and sociologists had embarked on the thorny path of speculative thought that was being abandoned by the philosophers. He wrote that the philosophers had become extremely reticent and cautious in their attitude to metaphysical speculation, whereas the physicists, physiologists and sociologists were engaged in speculation for all they were worth. Wundt seems to have been extremely one-sided and rather sceptical in his appraisal of the broad theoretical generalisations which ushered in a new stage in the development of the science of nature; obviously he was not convinced that on this path natural science was approaching a more profound knowledge of reality. However, the 419 speculative enthusiasm that Wundt attributed to theoretical natural science is very far removed from metaphysical speculation; rather it is the development of the dialectical mode of thought in a form peculiar to each particular science. This tendency was noted by Niels Bohr, who pointed out two kinds of truths in natural science: "One kind of truth is made up of such simple and clear statements that their opposites are obviously untrue. The other kind, the so-called ’profound truths’, consists, on the contrary, of such assertions that their opposites also contain profound truths."  [419•1  The corpuscular and wave theories of light are often cited as an example of such mutually exclusive but mutually complementary truths. Physicists as well as philosophers have appraised such truths not as unique, but as the expression of the objective relationship inherent in natural processes and their cognition on a sufficiently high theoretical level: the unity of opposites.  [419•2 

p About a hundred years ago most natural scientists were convinced that scientific advance 420 would gradually put an end to controversy resulting from errors, because these would be overcome by the progress of the sciences towards more and more exhaustive knowledge of their subject of investigation. These scientists could not conceive that developing science would open up new fields of reality with which the existing theories and concepts would not be in accord (or at least not fully in accord).  [420•1  "Human thought,” Lenin said, "goes endlessly deeper from appearance to essence, from essence of the first order, as it were, to essence of the second order, and so on without end.”  [420•2  This truth is today becoming the profound conviction of all scientists thanks to the fact that modern natural science has testified ad oculos that the sciences, while never exhausting their subject, constantly expand the theoretical basis of scientific discussions, which are becoming a more and more necessary and fruitful form of development of scientific knowledge. Max Planck confirmed this tendency when he wrote, "As it has been for time immemorial in religion and the arts, so it is now in science. There is scarcely a single 421 fundamental proposition that is not questioned by someone, or a piece of nonsense in which someone does not believe. . . .”  [421•1  This statement should not be taken as an expression of philosophical scepticism; it merely registers a fact that has not only epistemological but class roots, because in the intellectual atmosphere of bourgeois society, infected with idealist and religious prejudice, scientific polemics are constantly being conducted on unscientific lines.

p To sum up, then, scientific progress, contrary to the oversimplified notions that were held in the last century, far from removing the ground for controversy, has enormously stimulated the development of scientific debate, because the range of controversial theoretical questions and debatable solutions has perceptibly widened. The great source of scientific debate is to be found not in error but in the dialectical movement of the process of cognition, which reflects the dialectical contradictions of objective reality. Characterising the spirit of committed, militant polemics inherent in Marxism, Lenin pointed out, " ’Marx’s system’ is of a ’polemical nature’, not because it is ’ tendentious’, but because it provides an exact picture, in theory, of all the contradictions that are present in reality. For this reason, incidentally, all attempts to master ’Marx’s system’ without mastering its ’polemical nature’ are and will continue to be unsuccessful: the ’polemical nature’ of the system is nothing more than a true reflection of the ’polemical nature’ of capitalism itself.”  [421•2  What Lenin says in this case about a given 422 socio-economic reality is in a certain sense applicable to any objective dialectical process, allowing for the peculiar features inherent in antagonistic capitalist relations, because, as Lenin said, "with Marx the dialectics of bourgeois society is only a particular case of dialectics".  [422•1 

p But does not the proliferation of scientific controversies and, hence, differences of opinion in science, show that the field of consensus is constantly diminishing? Any such conclusion would be extremely premature because, thanks to scientific discoveries, thanks to the fruitfulness of scientific debate and the improvement of methods of research, the field of consensus is, in fact, constantly widening.

It would be a mistake not to see that the advances of the sciences and their changed conditions of development have wrought a qualitative change in the nature of scientific debate. The opponents of Copernicus and Galileo cited the Bible or the immediate evidence of the senses. NonEuclidean geometry was “overthrown” by the arguments of everyday common sense that appeared wholly tenable in Euclid. The theory of relativity was confronted by the traditional propositions of classical mechanics, which had been confirmed by experiment, a fact that Einstein himself never sought to disprove. Today such crude polemics have been to a great extent discredited. Scientific argument has become more rigorous, substantiated and self-critical. It is based on more exact analysis and definition of concepts, and takes into consideration the relativity and concreteness of truth. The mathematical penetration of the natural sciences has imposed an even stricter 423 form on their propositions and sets forth new demands to those who advance ideas that seek to restrict or overthrow established scientific propositions. Present-day laboratory techniques, experiment and observation have extended the horizons of observed phenomena and created new, far more favourable conditions for the objective recording and description of facts, the testing of hypotheses and the theoretical interpretation of observed phenomena. But this development of intellectual techniques of observation has not dried up the well-springs of scientific debate. On the contrary, the debate has acquired a form more befitting its real substance.