Scientific Realism for the Contemporary Materialist

In this extended note we discuss some trends and developments in the philosophy of science and related questions that are potentially of substantial interest to Marxists. The benefits of a fruitful dialogue between scientific realism and dialectical materialism, which would assist in elaborating a Marxist view of science, have been elegantly alluded to in a remarkable essay by the American philosopher, Roy Wood Sellars.1 In a brief sympathetic survey 2 of dialectical materialism written in 1944, Sellars credits Marxism as the only intellectual force that steadfastly stood up to positivism for several decades despite its origins outside academia and its relative lack of academic acceptance for several decades. However with the growth of realist trends in academic philosophy itself, Sellars writes of the positive contribution that could be made to advance the insight available in Marxist classics such as Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism by utilizing the technical advances of philosophy. Sellars ’ own pursuit of this engagement in subsequent years resulted in the volume of essays titled Philosophy for the Future: The Quest of Modern Materialism3 edited by him together with V.J. McGill and Marvin Farber. This fascinating volume contains not only essays by Sellars and his son, the (better known) philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, but also those of a host o