ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the basis for a realist epistemology and correspondence notion of truth. It argues that neither knowledge in general, nor any particular knowledge claim, can ever be proven absolutely. Dialectics has been understood in the past as a new form of logic and sometimes as a new fundamental aspect of reality, including physical reality. Perhaps the most important of dialectical materialism's contribution to epistemology was the insistence upon the social/historical nature of knowledge production. The constancy of the characteristics of things-in-themselves is actually the cause of constant conjunctures of events. Characteristics of things-in-themselves, while possessing constancy in their interaction, must be seen as producing causal tendencies with respect to events rather than inevitability. The reality of the thing-in-itself possesses many levels of complexity beyond that which is directly perceivable. The nature of 'intentionality', the detail of the perceptual process, may be left to the science of psychology.
