Hi everyone, welcome to another entry of our Short Attention Span Reading Group

The Text

We will study On Contradiction by Mao.

It is divided into 6 sections (7 if we count the very short conclusion), none of them will take you more than 20min to read (most will take less) :).

I think this essay can be summarized by its first sentence

The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics.

And this is all it studies, starting to what is the difference between dialectics and metaphysics, the law of contradiction, what are contradictions, how are they defined, what are their different types, and so on. And of course what it means for Marxism.

The biggest question I am left with after reading this essay is the place of Nature in materialist dialectics...

Supplementary material

  • On Practice by Mao Tse-tung. It is significantly shorter than On Contradiction, and they both go hand in hand.
  • ChaiTRex [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    As far as why I personally proposed that formalism, it was because you claimed that multiple positions implied a non-function relation, which isn't necessarily the case.

    • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I mean it does; can you write a set of ordered pairs describing the motion of the particle above at certain points in time that

      1. Occupies more than 1 place at a given time
      2. Is a function

      And if so, how and why?

      • ChaiTRex [none/use name]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Sure.

        As for how, the first element of the ordered pair is a set of starting positions. The second element of the ordered pair is a set of ending positions. ({start_0, ...}, {end_0, ...}). The function is, of course, a set of these ordered pairs where each ordered pair's first element is unique in the set.

        The X in your definition of function is the same set as Y: the set of sets of positions.

        As for why, just to demonstrate that the statement was incorrect.

          • ChaiTRex [none/use name]
            ·
            4 years ago

            You mean to write the infinite set of ordered pairs of infinite sets? No, I can't quite do that, as it would take infinite time.

            • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
              ·
              4 years ago

              Not all of them, just a few of them. I think I know the solution you're couching in the abstract terms above, and I want you to explicitly lay it out so we can look at how absurd it is.

              Let's say at t = 1, t = 1.5, and t = 3.

              • ChaiTRex [none/use name]
                ·
                4 years ago

                It doesn't quite matter how absurd it appears to you. What matters is that it fulfills the definition of function you said it didn't.

                • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
                  ·
                  4 years ago

                  Sure it matters. I've already acknowledged you can shoe-horn the assertion into any system. But I've also pointed out that this makes the assertion meaningless.

                  So now I'm looking to see if you can provide me a kinematic example of a particle moving in R1 occupying two places at once, where the second point it's occupying isn't meaningless nonsense.