Dialectic Fallacy, The

The fallacy that all problems can be understood in terms of the struggle between two tendencies: good/evil, light/dark, right/wrong, working class/ruling class, my religion/your religion, my politics/your politics—a way of winding all life’s variety onto just two spools. The fallacy is important because it allows everything to be explained. If things are going well, that is, of course, because workers are winning the struggle for now; if things are going badly, that is down to the capitalists and they need to be punished. Here is an identity-defining cause to which anyone can belong, and it gives its members plenty to do, without fear of ever being proved wrong—for the dialectic is unfalsifiable: whatever the outcome, it can be explained by the theory.

The difficulty with this fallacy is that “dialectics” is a word to which almost everyone seems to ascribe a different meaning. The dialectic (Gr: dialektos, discourse) referred originally to the investigation of truth in discussion, and it was used in this sense in the Wyclif Bible:

Job . . . determyneth alle the lawes of dialatik, in proposicoun, assumpcoun, etc.^D31

Kant, Hegel, Marx and Engels all used it in different ways.^D32 Lean Logic offers no guarantee that the meaning defined above is already recognised by anyone, but suggests that it would be useful if it were.

Related entries:

Bivalence, Internal Evidence.