ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 explores the logical character of Marx’s scientific achievements. It stresses that logic itself, understood as the forms of reasoning applied to propositions and inferences in scientific practice, has developed alongside science. Logic itself is seen to emerge organically from within the scientific tradition; logic is immanent to science. Historically, the primary focus in the philosophy of science was on both deductive inferences (reasoning from premises to conclusions) and inductive inferences (the formation of generalized propositions based upon observational premises). Science is now understood to involve several logical forms including deduction, induction, abduction (moving away from correlations to hypothesize about causation), and retroduction (establishing a conceptual framework to explain the causal factors “behind” the more obvious correlations). We stress that the science of Marx and Engels, moreover, in addition to evincing all logical forms, epitomizes the retroductive dimension of science. We conclude that the propositional form that best summarizes the processes of retroductive explanation, owing especially to the cumulative effects of a relatively secure constellation of transitive concepts, is the “analytic a posteriori”.
