ABSTRACT
It is not ‘impressed’ by anything, both in the sense of not letting thought rest with the appearance
of a given historical form and the rejection of any illusion of permanency or stasis in social life.
The temptation, however, is to then fetishise the dialectical understanding of change by mistak-
ing contradictions in social life as consonant with conceptual contradictions and therefore as
something that enables one to predict the way the ‘synthesis’ will form (with synthesis
equated to the most rational solution to the contradiction as if in a logical problem). Only
when contradiction has reached incompatible relations of contrariety, where it is so entrenched
that is constantly encountered in social relations, and only where social forces strong enough to
sublate the contradiction exist, that the inducement of a movement of change becomes even
possible. Dialectics focuses on the immanent social forces surrounding such contradictions, as
opposed to prognosticating the likely or desired outcome. And yet, the relation between dialec-
tical and standard logic should not be overlooked here either. As Alker has demonstrated, dia-
lectical logic is abductive and empirical not merely formal, and is therefore complimentary to
formal logic (Alker, 1982b, p. 21). In this sense, dialectics can, at least to some extent, ‘show
sociopolitical actors the possible solutions to contradictory situations’ (Alker, 1982b, p. 1,
quoting Cardoso & Faletto, 1979, p. xiiif). Alker illustrates the benefits of such dialectical
thought when combined with standard logic, in reference to the Lord/Slave dialectic, and in
