Aristotle’s historia, or dialectic in science: establishing from scratch what the subject matter is

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This paper explores what James Lennox has called the pre-demonstrative stage in Aristotle’s conception of scientific inquiry, which is mainly concerned with the task of establishing primitive universal predication, thus establishing the facts, as opposed to the demonstrative stage, occupied with causal explanations. Focusing mainly on the Historia Animalium, I propose that historia, for Aristotle, consists in dialectical investigations that aim at producing an adequate description of the subject at hand, a description that will allow causal problems to emerge and be answered using the results of this investigation. Such a proposal requires defining dialectic, a definition that will not account for all of the aspects of dialectic, in all the possible situations, but that will nonetheless refer to a dialectical core common to all situations: to outwardly dialogical situations like debates, or to less obviously dialectical situations like the pursuit of scientific inquiry. The bare-bone description I propose is the following: dialectic is the process of progressively determining the extension of terms through objections and their resolution. As argued, the scientific use of dialectic corresponds to this content-establishing process, constitutes the pre-demonstrative scientific stage of inquiry, and is the locus for the emergence of domain-specific norms of inquiry.