It seems that we have a few friends among us that knows what dialectical materialism is. Could they explain it to the rest of us?
I have tried figuring it out myself before, but it seems that every author understands it differently.
There is always more to read, but I currently see it as a step-wise process of non-derivative hypothesis generation, each from a different source.
1. from data. (thesis)
2. from a counter-example to 1. (anti-thesis)
3. from substructural-negations of 1 and 2. (synthesis)
I put non-derivative in italics because I think it's very important. Many people make the mistake of thinking synthesis is a compromise between the other two hypotheses when it should be something novel, innovative, and non-derivative which subsumes their substructural negations. To a lesser degree some people think that anti-thesis is a mere substructural negation of the thesis, "exception-barring" as Lakatos calls it, but it should be just as exceptional as the first thesis.
>>2 I read the wikipedia article on dialectic materialism since you mentioned different authors interpret it differently; I've not read many of these authors. To my eyes it seems that either the authors or the editors of wikipedia are conflating historical materialism and dialectic materialism. To me historical materialism is a specific result of appling dialectic materialism to Hegelianism on the one hand, and Classic Economics on the other. I don't really want to explain this however.