Quite a different topic this week, enjoyed it. One thing I hadn't really considered before listening to this was the utility of dialectical reasoning. I did SCIE1000 (Theory and Practice in Science), so naturally we learnt all about induction and deduction and rationality and Popper and falsifiability etc. I'm just wondering how all of this dialectical reasoning is meant to fit into the whole self-experimentation process we were discussing a couple of weeks ago… Where should it have the largest influence on the conducting of said experiment?

Obviously I think we should leave the design to good scientific practice. By manipulating conditions we push apart the venn diagrams of those conditions so their overlap is tiny (i.e. they only differ by our manipulation, in an ideal experiment) and therefore attributions can be surer. I'm just wondering if dialectical reasoning should have any place in interpreting the results of experiments conducted with thorough manipulations (which we believe to separate and sterilise conditions to artifacts). As I understand it from the readings and podcast, dialectical reasoning encourages considering relationships and context, and the grand scheme of things, as opposed to categorisation and binary decision making of western logic. It seems like dialectical reasoning has theories about the real world which are much less binary and causal and sure than many real-world phenomena that have been shown with induction and scientific practice. Can dialectical reasoning explain complex relationships that double blind randomised experiments cannot? I'm guessing that those theories would be better explained with a type of multiple regression model... Or maybe I'm completely wrong, because I actually have no idea whether these 'theories' exist. The wave-particle duality example was actually very cool, I hadn't considered that science tends towards absolutes rather than dualities until that example was given. But it's true isn't it? Science loves absolutes. In some cases, I could imagine this probably isn't the best strategy (as I said, I have no idea whether this is actually a truth, but it's my postulation)... Can/should we turn to dialectical reasoning, or should we continue to put all of our eggs in the logic/induction basket?