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The Dialectic Method In Research

The idea behind research is the search for new knowledge. However that is not the case, more strictly today it has become new knowledge that does not contradict current knowledge, but underpins it.

In this manner a person not only has to defend their thesis against a panel of experienced people of their own field of research, but they have to justify their arguments upon the basis that it implies new knowledge that settles a matter of some dispute in the current knowledge.

Anyone could see that to resolve a dispute with new information could by analogy be a conjunction that resolves two equally valuable but contradictory "facts". It would be easier to find an explanation for why current theory is in appearance contradictory then it would be to find an alternative explanation to prove one correct, and the vast weight of accumulated knowledge on the other part totally incorrect.

Modern study then has a lot of work to do! Taking the example of relativity on the large scale and quantum physics on the small, finding a subsequent relativistic theory within current knowledge to replace quantum mechanics altogether would be derided unless it agreed on every observation of quantum mechanics, which would be very hard to argue!

Likewise it becomes nonsense to assume that anything but an argument that justifies the contradiction could be accepted as new knowledge - a possibility that is inherently dialectic in its nature. Rather than throw out all current knowledge as suspect, it has become the norm to expect that no-one could ever possibly arrive with information that would reinvent the wheel.

Also, on the other side is the negation to disjunction. Showing that two streams (results) from an already commonly agreed upon method provide contradictory results: that someone elses work should be discredited is also a very hard job to perform. So much so that the underlying theory which underpins the accepted fact would need throwing out, and the efforts of all who have found theory in the first case should also be discredited. It becomes dialectic once more to simply "invent" a fix to theorise hy the results do not agree with current theory, without throwing out either theory or observation.

No wonder most research is involved in specialising upon what is known already- If the task of knowledge is such an uphill battle, we may have many times thrown out the best answers and left ourselves with faulty theory!


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