Cherry-picking Dialectical Materialism

[∞]

As research envelopes in empirical science, what are dialectical materialists going to do if one of their axioms are proven false?
Though it may be too soon to ask a question like this, if this were the case...can we still hold the general principle? Following every detail of DM without first knowing if these laws can be proven (with complete certainty), almost seems religious.
I believe it's more ideologically sound if we can adopt the general principle that things are determined by material conditions and not Monotheistic and mystic concepts of free-will. That is, if this is an essential element in Dialectical Materialism.

What doesn't seem linear to me are the specific axioms that aren't closely related enough to the general principle.
I do realize that my understanding of DM isn't the best (although the concept is notorious for it's vagueness), but I'm doing my best to understand what is written.

[Kronsteen]

what are dialectical materialists going to do if one of their axioms are proven false?

How would you go about disproving an axiom like this one?: Everything changes from one moment to the next, and moments are infinitely short.

How could such a claim even be investigated? Can you design an instrument to measure the length of the smallest possible unit of time? Could you bring an object down to absolute zero and then check with perfect precision whether it's moving or not?

Could you do so without disturbing the very thing you're trying to measure? If it's impacting on your instruments, then some kind of 'movement' is occurring.

What about: Everything is connected, directly or indirectly, in some way, to everything else.

Or: All motion is produced by internal contradictions.

On the one hand, it's obviously disproven because movement due to gravity is not internal to the thing falling. But on the other, you can always redefine 'internal' to include the relation between the earth and the object, because both are attracting each other.

No, the terms of dialectical materialism are sufficiently elastic and vague that you can't pin them down precisely enough to test. And even if somehow you could, anyone could simply accuse you of not testing the real meaning of the terms.

[ZeroNowhere]

As research envelopes in empirical science, what are dialectical materialists going to do if one of their axioms are proven false?
Though it may be too soon to ask a question like this, if this were the case...can we still hold the general principle? Following every detail of DM without first knowing if these laws can be proven (with complete certainty), almost seems religious.
That's about as likely as the law of value or the fact that bachelors are unmarried being 'proven false' by evidence, really. Not every truth fits into the classical empiricist or verificationist/pseudo-Wittgensteinian paradigm. It's not clear how, for example, Marx's dialectical presentation of production and consumption in the Grundrisse introduction is to be 'falsified', or indeed how we're to bring empirical falsification into things in the first place when investigating the relationship between subject and object, society and individual, or that, "It is true that thought and being are distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with one another." If one tried to resolve the debate between behaviourism and dualism empirically, one would probably just end up looking silly.


I believe it's more ideologically sound if we can adopt the general principle that things are determined by material conditions and not Monotheistic and mystic concepts of free-will. That is, if this is an essential element in Dialectical Materialism.That's just as much a principle of naturalistic materialism as of a dialectical materialism.


What doesn't seem linear to me are the specific axioms that aren't closely related enough to the general principle.It seems that most parts of dialectics are connected with the 'general principle', which, to be brief, doesn't take opposites in abstraction but rather posits them in a unity in which each side contains the other within its essence, but at the same time is distinct from it. There's a fair bit more to it than that, but that 'general principle' is pretty much related to most of it, from the discussions of society and the individual in the 1844 manuscripts to the discussion of calculus and the negation of the negation in the 1881 mathematical manuscripts.