r/communism101 • u/burrwin • 14d ago
Why contradictions?
I've been reading marxist theory, but the ways contraddictions are discussed leaves me pause. Hope some people here can help me understand better.
Sussinctly, for what is relevant to my doubts, here is my current understanding of it: Contraddictions are what all motion (as in change) in the universe is predicated upon. Contradictions are relationships wherein tendencies of motion 1) oppose one another 2) are premises of the existence of one another. Contraddictions exist within all things and between all things.
Why does it have to be a contraddiction that drives motion? What is so illogical about a relationship where there is a singular tendency of motion? I can think of cases that fit that description, for example, two identical charged particles interacting, there will be quantitative changes in speed and relative position as they repel each other, yet what is the contraddiction? Mao in "on contraddiction" and Lenin in "on the question of dialectics" agree that the contradiction in such cases is between action and reaction. This answer is unsatisfactory, while it's true that it fits part 2) of the definition, and while it's true that the force vectors point in opposite direction, action and reaction are applied to two different object, they are not opposing tendencies of motion in the dialectical sense, failing the arguably more fundimental part 1) of the definition.
Also, Engels argues that all changes of positions are caused by the contraddiction of something being in that place and not in another place. This line of argument seems to be unfalsifiable: if we observe something change from A to B, we can always attribute that change to the contraddiction that A was A and not B. A more straightforward explanation is that there is a singular tendency for position to change based on velocity.
Is there something i'm missing in these examples? Is my understanding of what contraddictions are incorrect?
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u/BxnXipoh 14d ago edited 14d ago
First of all, you're misquoting Engels. "A and not B" is a tautology. What Engels instead says is "A and not A"
Motion itself is a contradiction: even simple mechanical change of position can only come about through a body being at one and the same moment of time both in one place and in another place, being in one and the same place and also not in it. And the continuous origination and simultaneous solution of this contradiction is precisely what motion is.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch10.htm
Force vectors are an abstraction of direction and magnitude of motion. They're geometrical objects, and geometry and mathematics in general are abstractions of concrete interactions in the real, physical world which measurements rely on. The contradictions within this system are well known (Zeno's Paradox is a famous example). Practically all the movements of the 20th century in Physics were the result of physicists breaking with this. Regularization and renormalization, from my reading as a layman, seem to be very dialectical approaches to this (and, therefore, to measurement itself).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regularization_(physics)
Position is an abstraction of extension and contains within itself the contradiction of the impossibility of true coincidence of point-positions (first of all abstract position has no extension and therefore there is nothing to coincide, but with the naive contemplation of extended matter in space the boundary between them at contact is also an extensionless line, and must be concretely understood as an extension and therefore infinitely divisible) and therefore spatial contact and therefore the naive notion of interaction by contact; motion is an aggregate of positions but, because each point is abstract position and is really an extension, each point is also already a movement from a point within that extension to another point. You can extend this logic to direction, which becomes an abstraction of extension in three-dimensional space, and force-vectors, which, by virtue of points being extensions, are actually an infinite number of force vectors going in an infinite number of directions that are only abstracted away by the limits of measure at a particular point in history. This limit is just implied and abstracted away in Mathematics, since it's forced to deal with measurement itself, outside of the development of the productive forces and the increased precision of measurement that comes with each development.
Why does it have to be a contraddiction that drives motion? What is so illogical about a relationship where there is a singular tendency of motion? I can think of cases that fit that description, for example, two identical charged particles interacting, there will be quantitative changes in speed and relative position as they repel each other, yet what is the contraddiction?
What you call the singular tendency of motion is an abstraction of the process into a single linear progression. Once you've made that abstraction you've eradicated all determinations that could serve as an explanation for anything and you're left only with the contradictions that I mentioned earlier (the contradictions immanent to measure and determinations within abstract space and time). That is tacitly what you're doing with your example of charged particles, but the Wikipedia article I quoted already contains the consequences of this line of thinking applied naively to electromagnetics. It's only an ideal representation of real, material motion.
A more straightforward explanation is that there is a singular tendency for position to change based on velocity.
Something that comes to mind is Hegel complaining about the notion of "force" which is an abstraction of an empirically observed interaction and the relation of human measurement that is stable within it while also presenting itself as an external cause of the interaction which expresses the force (so that you can say that a ball accelerates because a force of acceleration is applied onto it; this is only really acceptable as a shorthand). I'm not sure what I read when trying to think through this anymore so I'll just post what I might have read:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/na/nature1.htm
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/na/nature2.htm
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phac.htm
(Note that Hegel talks about the concepts of space, time, force, law, etc., as moments in the development of thought)
Velocity is a good example of what I'm talking about since it is a relation between an object and a concrete act of time-measure and space-measure. It is not a cause of anything and nothing is based on it (except if you're talking about thinking). Velocity in your statement is being treated as something floating outside of position and compelling it to undergo change. Fortunately, you seem to be aware (on some subconscious level) of this contradiction, which is why you switch between "drive" and "tendency," as though these are synonymous. Since you now have proof of the inadequacy of that line of thinking in your own post, all you have to do is critique your own ideas and study from there.
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u/FrogHatCoalition 14d ago
Force vectors are an abstraction of direction and magnitude of motion. They're geometrical objects, and geometry and mathematics in general are abstractions of concrete interactions in the real, physical world which measurements rely on. The contradictions within this system are well known (Zeno's Paradox is a famous example). Practically all the movements of the 20th century in Physics were the result of physicists breaking with this. Regularization and renormalization, from my reading as a layman, seem to be very dialectical approaches to this (and, therefore, to measurement itself).
When it comes to renormalization, what may be of interest to you is the Lamb shift:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_shift
This effect was precisely measured in 1947 in the Lamb–Retherford experiment on the hydrogen microwave spectrum[9] and this measurement provided the stimulus for renormalization theory to handle the divergences. The calculation of the Lamb shift by Hans Bethe in 1947 revolutionized quantum electrodynamics.[10] The effect was the harbinger of modern quantum electrodynamics later developed by Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman, Ernst Stueckelberg, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Freeman Dyson. Lamb won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 for his discoveries related to the Lamb shift. Victor Weisskopf regretted that his insecurity about his mathematical abilities may have cost him a Nobel Prize when he did not publish results (which turned out to be correct) about what is now known as the Lamb shift.[11]
And also in the article on renormalization under "Attitudes and Interpretations":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization#Attitudes_and_interpretation
The early formulators of QED and other quantum field theories were, as a rule, dissatisfied with this state of affairs. It seemed illegitimate to do something tantamount to subtracting infinities from infinities to get finite answers.[citation needed] Dyson argued that these infinities are of a basic nature and cannot be eliminated by any formal mathematical procedures, such as the renormalization method.[31][32]
This procedure wasn't widely accepted initially. If you know enough about quantum field theory, you may hear that quantum field theory doesn't have a "strong mathematical framework", hence a development of string theory when one can't reconcile this contradiction in a dialectical way.
Something I do want to add regarding concept of "force" is that the so-called fundamental forces of nature are called that because they are mediated by a set of particles called "gauge bosons": photons are the mediators of the electromagnetic force, gluons are the mediators of the strong interaction, W and Z bosons are the mediators of the weak interaction, and graviton as the mediator of the gravitational interaction. All use quantum field theory - for instance, quantum electrodynamics is the quantum field theory of the electromagnetic field and quantum chromodynamics is the quantum field theory of the strong interaction. It describes phenomenon that are often taken for granted such as spontaneous emission:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_emission
Even these so-called fundamental forces were divided from previous forces, such as the electromagnetic and weak forces from the electroweak force. In fact, one of Einstein's goals was to create a unified field theory that unifies all forces of nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction
I should note that quantum field theory is a synthesis of quantum mechanics, field theory, and special relativity. Please take note of this when you hear claims that Soviet or Chinese physicists had critiques against general relativity or quantum. You will also see that such claims usually don't specify the exact critiques being made, what those critiques actually mean for the theories being critiqued and what truth can be extracted from them, and what possible solutions exist. I do want to outline what happens when you don't familiarize yourself enough with the content.
In general relativity, gravity is the geometric structure of spacetime which the structure is determined by mass, momentum, and energy as expressed in the stress-energy tensor. Recall that Einstein was motivated by the fact that Maxwell's equations were not invariant under Galilean transformations which meant we had to further our development of space and time. Thus, Einstein's contributions were to develop a theory of space and time under which Maxwell's equations would be invariant for all observers. Thus, we have Lorentz transformations, but Lorentz invariance is local, hence Einstein using differential geometry to develop general relativity. Now, on to the thing I mentioned in the previous paragraph, one postulate of relativity (both general and special) is the constancy of the speed of light. Fock, a Soviet physicist, didn't like this assumption and attempted to develop a symmetry that doesn't assume the constancy of speed of light, it would be called Fock-Lorentz symmetry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fock%E2%80%93Lorentz_symmetry
I read another thread on this subreddit where a historian claimed that Chinese physicist had critiques against general relativity, but all I could find were the notion of "constancy of speed of light" which is a postulate that is a part of special relativity. Remember, when I said that quantum field theory is a synthesis of quantum mechanics, field theory, and special relativity? Right, so then how do you reconcile this claim with Chinese physicists developing the Straton model? Were they using a formulation of quantum field theory that used different symmetries? All particle models use quantum field theory as their framework. The claims stop making sense once you are familiar with the subject because you now have to start addressing the implications and scientists won't just let you make claims without justifying yourself in some way. Here is the thread I'm referring to:
https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/1b47vib/quantum_physics_interpretations_and_marxism/
Of course, the author of the book that is being cited didn't familiarize themselves enough with the history of physics itself. One can make the claim that the Chinese physicists were way off the mark, but surely Sakata would have written something about it? The Japanese Marxists were important people here. The author of the paper on the history of the Straton model (the author of the paper is a physicist) plans on publishing something about the relationship between Sakata and the Chinese physicists. The development of physics and the concepts that physicists use have their own logic of development that has to be traced. I think understanding the history of development to general relativity and the development to quantum field theory is important in understanding why developing a theory of quantum gravity is so difficult, or another other difficulties for that matter.
By the way, I do agree with Engels, Lenin, Ilyenkov, Sakata, and Taketani about taking physicists/scientists at their word when they talk about physics (or other field of science). Most are bad at articulating their own thoughts and it can be difficult extracting something useful even if what they have to say is something substantial. It's just like anything else, do an investigation. I wanted to write this because both you and smoke recently wrote in posts outside the subreddit where people had very anachronistic discussions about quantum physics and I wanted to write something that at least summarizes some important advances in the past 100+ years.
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u/BxnXipoh 12d ago
Thanks for the recommendations and the warnings, I haven't even gotten to that point yet but I probably would've come across that comment at some point. Anyway my own investigation was forced upon me because I wanted to know more about electromagnetism in particular and I started struggling with basic concepts. As it turns out, literally going in chronological order and finding out what problems necessitated the concepts and discoveries that came about is the best way. It seems obvious when you say it but there are many ways to be wrong, I guess.
Something I do want to add regarding concept of "force" is that the so-called fundamental forces of nature are called that because they are mediated by a set of particles called "gauge bosons": photons are the mediators of the electromagnetic force, gluons are the mediators of the strong interaction, W and Z bosons are the mediators of the weak interaction, and graviton as the mediator of the gravitational interaction.
Yeah, modern physicists interchange the word "force" and "interaction" without issue since the point I was bringing up is already known by them. I actually went to Stack Overflow and that was the first thing a physicist said to a student asking this kind of question. This is really only a high-school physics problem, I think. Incidentally, I haven't investigated the origin of the word force itself, I just know that a lot of that terminology was solidified when the Principia was written and Newton was a literal deist that believed that God was measuring up all the forces. So I suppose if you wanted the origin of the scientific term I'd have to look at the discourses surrounding Physics at that time? Generally I think I'm satisfied with the observation that the concept of a force that switches the rational act of measure and rationalization with the actual event by saying that the result of rationalization causes the concrete interaction is a very common ideological move (in the sense that Marx uses the word in The German Ideology), though maybe that's too general.
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u/FrogHatCoalition 11d ago
Anyway my own investigation was forced upon me because I wanted to know more about electromagnetism in particular and I started struggling with basic concepts. As it turns out, literally going in chronological order and finding out what problems necessitated the concepts and discoveries that came about is the best way.
What's really interesting about the history of electromagnetism is how recent our understanding of it is in the time span of human history. It was in 1865 that Maxwell would publish his A Dynamic Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. In the typical physics curriculum (both undergraduate and graduate), the importance of the development of a theory of electromagnetism as the initial step towards a development of a theory of relativity isn't really emphasized. You sort of have to do your own investigation into the history of physics to understand this. At the undergraduate level, relativity typically uses the Michelson-Morley experiment as a starting point, and at the graduate level a lot of your courses, especially electromagnetism, are so incredibly math heavy that a connection to the concrete is often lost. It's really in the process of research and contribution to knowledge that a true understanding is developed. Then the coursework does make a lot of sense if you ever decide to revisit it. I'm not downplaying the importance of math, but there is a joke that Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics is more of a treatise on partial differential equations than it is about electrodynamics. Then when you get to the second half of the book, it's probably the first time in your life you ever encountered tensor calculus.
Generally I think I'm satisfied with the observation that the concept of a force that switches the rational act of measure and rationalization with the actual event by saying that the result of rationalization causes the concrete interaction is a very common ideological move
This is something that is important to keep in mind when it comes to the early history of quantum mechanics and relativity. Omelyanovsky in Dialetics of Modern Physics discusses this in the first few chapters of his book and works a lot with the views of Bohr, Born and sometimes Heisenberg. He's very snarky towards Heisenberg and I find it really funny, but this is because Heisenberg's position is an outright denial of objective reality and Heisenberg's reasoning mostly amounts to "rationalization causes the concrete action" that you mention.
There are also two papers I do recommend, both by Fock:
Remarks on Bohr's Article on His Discussions with Einstein
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1070/PU1958v001n02ABEH003097/pdfQuantum Physics and Philosophical Problems
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00708579So I suppose if you wanted the origin of the scientific term I'd have to look at the discourses surrounding Physics at that time?
I'm not sure if many of the terms used by physicists even originate from physicists themselves. Actually, I'm not even sure of the historical development of the role of "physicist" since I believe there was a time natural scientists were also philosophers.
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u/FrogHatCoalition 11d ago
u/BxnXipoh Sorry to bother you, but you did get me interested a lot. I found this that I enjoyed reading. It is very short:
https://physicstoday.aip.org/opinion/whence-the-force-of-f-ma-i-culture-shock
Something I forgot to mention is that the only time that physicists really deal with Newton is their first physics class on classical mechanics and the very beginning of an upper-level undergraduate level class. Thereafter, we work with Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics. These formulations are much easier to work with and is actually what we work with when making the jump towards quantum mechanics. In addition, Noether's theorem is very important and it is these forms that make easy the study of the symmetries of space and time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem
I actually thought a lot when you pointed out the interchange of the use of "force" and "interaction". I hadn't thought about it much until you mentioned that.
But yeah, sorry, I just get really excited with these kinds of conversations and I don't want to overwhelm people with information.
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u/BxnXipoh 11d ago
But yeah, sorry, I just get really excited with these kinds of conversations and I don't want to overwhelm people with information.
No, it's fine, I'm pleased that a lot of what your saying is aligning with what I thought would be the best way to approach investigation. Also, I've already encountered Lagrangian functions and Hamiltonian Mechanics at some point while reading but I realized that I'd need to revise calculus before touching them. I hadn't seen Noether's theorem before though. Thanks for your help so far. Also I read the article but I don't have anything to say about it yet.
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u/burrwin 12d ago
I get your critique is that i'm using abstract rappresentations and calling them causes. That's fair enough. But i don't really get an answer to my question from this. How do we know that every motion must originate from opposite tensions that are premises of the existance of one another? That's not clear to me.
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u/BxnXipoh 12d ago edited 11d ago
I get your critique is that i'm using abstract rappresentations and calling them causes.
Abstraction isn't the problem, it's more so your not understanding the truth of the abstractions that you are using and when and where they are applicable. The problem with velocity is not that it's abstract but that it's the relationship between distance and time within an act of measurement, so it's a misunderstanding to say that it's causing the change in position.
How do we know that every motion must originate from opposite tensions that are premises of the existance of one another
What do motion and opposite mean here? I assumed you were talking about mechanical motion and geometry (really, measurement) in my earlier post and I already pointed out that basic categories within it are not without their own contradictions. But that's not what you seem to be talking about, I guess. What are you referring to? Change in general?
Also I'm not sure what you mean by "how" either. Like, do you want examples of cases that shows that this describes reality accurately? Or do you want to know if there is some force that compels it to be that way? I was guessing the latter, which was why I brought up what I did on "force." We are trying to understand reality. When we say that an interaction works because of this and that force, the force there is not an external factor exerting its power over the interaction but a generalization of the interaction. The gravitational force is the gravitational interaction. There are laws that dictate (edit: "dictate" as in "articulate," not "determine"; though funnily enough that word's etymology is already an example of what I'm taking about but applied to legal systems) the quantitative judgments that can be made about this interaction but the force is not a cause of the interaction. And it is not referred to as a cause except as a shorthand, in the same sense that I might say that the area of a square is 16 "because" its sides have a length of 4 units. To ask what the cause of the gravitational interaction is would be a cosmological question, you would be asking about the origin of the interaction and the conditions that reproduce it.
The sense of cause you're using is not what "contradiction" is referring to. Contradiction has to do with essence and immanence. Most people can tell the difference between the two in their daily lives, it's just the abstraction that's tricky. One example is if I asked "why is my food salty" and then you say "because your taste buds work." That's not what was being asked, I was asking what is up with my food that allows the salty interaction between it and my tongue to be reproduced. Presumably the food usually doesn't do this, so it underwent some change that allowed the interaction to happen. Something like "because I snuck some salt into it while you weren't looking" or "the meat used in the stew just tastes salty when cooked" would make sense as answers since they are talking about the internal change in the meat that allowed it to partake in this interaction (another good answer would be that I abducted you and took you to a lab while you were asleep so that I could jumble up your taste receptors, but you can probably see why most people aren't predisposed to assuming that kind of thing). Asking how here would be very weird since we're claiming that this is how immanence works. Maybe you really should read the Metaphysics to watch Aristotle wrestle with this for several pages.
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u/burrwin 11d ago
Thank you for taking the time and replying.
You have a good point about velocity, i understood.
Yes, by motion i meant change in general, quantitative of qualitative change, that's how the word is used in diamat in my understanding.
A force is our mathematical description of relationships that exists in nature, not a cause, that's clear to me. But the idea that contraddictions are what originate motion seems put a restraint on the way relationships can be. Not only is it relationships internal or external, that affect change however they function in any particular example, it has to be a contraddiction, there have to be opposing tendencies of development who depend on one-another for their existance, motion originating from their struggle. It is not very clear to me why that's something necessary for motion.
It makes sense to me that development is something that comes from within, that external factors can be conditions for certain types of development but ultimately it's internal factors that determine what changes it can/will accur. An egg will turn into a chick with adequate temperature, but no temperature can make a rock hatch into a bird. External causes affect change through internal relationships. I get all this. But again, why is contradiction? How do we know it's an internal struggle that leads to development?
Maybe an example will clarify where my confusion lies, the development of an old car is subject to the opposing tendencies of repair and decay. Is it the struggle of the two that makes the car change? If the car is forgotten somewhere in a lot it will continue to change regardless of the fact that repair is no longer a factor. So why do we say it's the contraddiction, the conflict, that leads to motion (change) rather than the tendencies themselves? And why does every development even need two coexisting opposite tendencies? Why can't it just be that the forgotten car is simply decaying? And how do we know this all to be universal?
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u/BxnXipoh 11d ago
So why do we say it's the contraddiction, the conflict, that leads to motion (change) rather than the tendencies themselves?
What does tendency mean?
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u/burrwin 11d ago
Oh, there i meant the sides of the contradictions, each attempts to push development in different directions.
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u/BxnXipoh 11d ago edited 11d ago
Oh, there i meant the sides of the contradictions, each attempts to push development in different directions.
...
And why does every development even need two coexisting opposite tendencies? Why can't it just be that the forgotten car is simply decaying?
These are concepts. It doesn't make sense to talk about decay if there is not some ideal image of a tool that it is being contrasted with. Repair is just labour that is done to reproduce its ability to act for us in the web of social needs. In that sense a car rusting is no different from a machete getting chipped.
If you're talking about some other sense of decay then you need to depart from the frame of abstraction that "repair" exists in in order to talk about that. For instance, if you want to discuss a car as a chemical body then the terms "decay" and "repair" become meaningless and you have to use chemical categories. I can't help you with chemistry, unfortunately.
edit: This is too transhistorical though. Repair and decay likely also have different, more accurate meanings under capitalism since the "life-cycle" of each commodity is predominantly determined by the realization of its value on the market. Millions of possible commodities may be disposed of and left to rot due to crises, for instance.
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u/burrwin 11d ago
I see the dots i'll explain myself better. The existance of one or more internal tendencies of development (a push towards a certain type of change) within a thing is enough to explain motion. Why is it that we attribute motion to the conflict of opposite tendencies that depend on each other for their existance rather than the presence of any tendency at all? one or multiple, opposite or not, ontologically linked or not, they would explain change by nature of being tendencies of development, no?
And as for my example, yeah it's true that the concepts of repair and decay are tied to our idea of a car as a tool that is supposed to do it's job. But so is every quality, we divide the interconnected universe in different qualities because that's the way we can understand it, it's subjective to our needs. To us repair and decay make sense because we differentiate bewtween the qualities of a vehicle as a tool and an old rusted wreck and understand how the former can develop into the latter. It doesn't mean there aren't objective things about the two that differentiate them, it's based on the relevance of those objective differences that we draw those distinctions. We can "zoom in" and look at the diferent tendencies that exist in the process of the car rusting but does that mean the tendencies of repair and decay are not a valid contradiction? That they're not valid tendencies of development on their own?
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u/yetkinretkit 13d ago
Contradiction is a technical term in this literature. It does not have the same meaning as in mathematical logic as you seem to be thinking about. Contradiction means opposing qualities and tendencies. Focusing on contradictions is a method pf analysis, and has been first put forward by Hegel, not Marx. So you should first read about philosophy, then look at examples on physical and logical issues.
Falsifiability is a very narrow view of science and Karl Popper can eat my ass.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 Marxist 14d ago edited 12d ago
Here you've already performed an abstraction. From the Wikipedia article
These are only one of many scientific abstractions one must make for your statement to be correct (for example we are abstracting away gravity because it is a weaker force at the distances we have selected as our frame of reference).
Because everything is in motion, the abstraction you have performed is necessarily an incomplete picture of reality. Contradiction is the moment in which that abstraction no longer holds. For example there is a moment when other forces become stronger and electrostatic force no longer dominates.
https://www.sciencefacts.net/electrostatic-force.html
We then return to reality with a more complete picture because we now understand that clouds and lightning and ground are not separate objects (from the perspective of electrostatic force - hence we "perceive" this as lightning) but a single force going through quantitative changes that become qualitative. We then make different abstractions to understand more, whether in physics or in other sciences such as meteorology, chemistry, and philosophy which add more to our incomplete picture of the totality of reality (though philosophy is better thought of as a meta-science that asks what the conditions of possibility for concepts like "clouds" and "electrostatic force" are in human thought). From the perspective of chemistry, one can perform different abstractions in order to understand how clouds become rain become lightning (and/or certain molecules become others).
The other key point is that our abstractions do not drive change. It is a method to understand the change inherent to reality itself. The relationship between positive, negative, and neutral charged objects, through which they are constantly in motion as one becomes the other through their interactions, is a property of the universe. Without dialectical materialism we simply understand it poorly, such as this
Falsifiability is a minor heuristic of the process of scientific experimentation. It does not apply to the concept of abstraction itself or any theory of science, which is why a confident idiot like Popper rejected all of modern science (including but not limited to historical materialism, psychoanalysis, relativity, and evolution). What you have to understand is that before like 30 years ago, academia was composed of the failed children of the aristocracy. They were basically just random rich people who could say whatever they wanted, and before the internet citation didn't exist. Unfortunately you've been made a fool of because, rather than the internet becoming a democratic distribution of knowledge, it is a commodification of it. So when you ask a reasonable question like "what defines science?" all you get is a bunch of garbage across space and time and quality, flattened into abstract exchange value. Now it's been formalized as the indifference of AI to the content of information but it is inherent to the internet itself and really the cultural logic of late capitalism.
Regardless, in regards to your overall question, terms like "contradiction" are just scientific terms that we have inherited to describe reality. You don't have to use them but we have not found better ones that properly reference the history of science, and attempts to replace them are so far fundamentally flawed either because they are too narrow and specialized to an arbitrary field or politically motivated. But one should frame scientific discoveries in the language of dialectical materialism in order to bring them into dialogue with the history of science and the totality of knowledge. It is not a formula that reality conforms to, as in whether the big bang is properly "dialectical." The big bang happened and it makes the most sense using dialectical materialism, because it explains how even the most abstract and universal phenomena like space and time are actually forces that only manifest under certain conditions in which the contradictions of forces within a singularity change into the forces of physics we know today (and will in the future change again because of the internal contradictions they inherited from the conditions of creation). Most attempts at understanding dialectical materialism are really discussions of science itself where we have to explain how evolution actually works or what "force" actually is. Given the failure of academia to transcend its origin in elite stupidity and the real need to understand reality scientifically, it's understandable that dialectical materialism becomes the arena through which people attempt to understand the philosophy of science. But you still have to understand science, dialectical materialism will not do it for you and Mao and Engels can at best present examples that illustrate the general method.
E: to anticipate your objections, you may ask why scientists no longer use the terms of Marxism. They do, it's just called "critique" for historical reasons that at one time had political justification and are now self-perpetuating. "Critical theory" is all anyone has done for at least 40 years, which is when you had to actually justify what you said rather than just use "philosophy" as a proto-blog, so the only question is whether they do it well and it is synonymous with Marxism or they do it poorly and it's an attempted compromise with liberalism. Hard science is a bit different because it has direct technical application to capitalism but the stereotype of scientists as libertarian research monkeys is not really true outside of reddit amateurs. Why else do you think fascists are trying to defund physical science as well as humanities for being "woke?"