ABSTRACT
Marx was a realist. (I will demonstrate this in Chapter 6, but, for now, let us assume it.) He must, then, have inferred retroductively, that is, he must have built up his theory ‘in reverse’, reasoning from problem (or explicandum) to explanation (or explicans). The first stage of the retroductive logic of discovery is formulating the problem to be explained; to borrow from Hanson, ‘some surprising phenomena, P123, are observed’. It may well be a discrepancy between the phenomena and our existing theories and their assumptions which causes our surprise. This stage is critical to the discoverer, for usually only the correct formulation of a problem contains the means of its resolution. It is critical to those wanting to appreciate the discovery too, for we cannot understand and evaluate an explanation until we know that which it aims to explain.
