ABSTRACT
To the Greeks the word dialectic first meant conversation, and when in the time of the sophists argumentative conversation developed into a fashionable parlor game, the rules of this game were also called dialectic. The game consisted of someone’s making an assertion, and someone else’s trying to lead him into self-contradiction by asking questions to be answered yes or no. With Aristotle, who brought those Platonic ideas down into the material world, and made them function as a kind of regulating norm for the growth of actual things, the word dialectic took a drop from its exalted position. Dialectic thinking seemed merely critical to him, or “tentative,” and not concerned with real or philosophie knowing. In the mind of the orthodox Marxist, dialectic is again the “leader in all knowledge” and “holds the primacy and rule of all philosophy,” and of all science too.
