Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? A Materialist Reappraisal of the Science–Philosophy Nexus

Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? A Materialist Reappraisal of the Science–Philosophy Nexus PhD Candidate: Sergio Leal Ramírez Professor Instructor, University of Havana, Cuba. [email protected] https://0000-0002-7701-2910 DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.33155.77609 Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal ii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................ iv Resumen ........................................................................................................................... v Resumo ............................................................................................................................ vi 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................ 1 2. Methodology .............................................................................................................. 5 Epistemological Foundations ......................................................................................... 5 Data Sources and Selection Criteria .............................................................................. 6 Sources were selected based on three criteria: ............................................................. 6 Analytical Procedure The analysis proceeds through three interrelated stages: ............ 7 Limitations and Reflexivity ............................................................................................. 8 3. Philosophy and Scientific Revolutions: A Materialist Reappraisal .............................. 8 Galileo and the Birth of Mathematical Physics ............................................................... 9 Einstein and the Relativity of Space-Time ....................................................................10 Heisenberg and the Quantum Turn ..............................................................................11 Engels, Lenin, and the Dialectics of Nature ..................................................................12 4. THE Myth of Philosophical Neutrality and Its Ideological Function ...............................13 5. Conclusion ................................................................................................................18 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................23 Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal iii Acknowledgments This monograph began as a reflection on a simple but profound question posed in an online academic forum on ResearchGate on December 4 2025: “Can philosophy help to innovate and develop scientific theory?” The full post can be found at https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_philosophy_help_to_innovate_and_develop_scien tific_theory#view=692ff53d69beb6f8000de8c8. While the informal exchange that followed provided initial motivation, the arguments developed herein are grounded entirely in rigorous engagement with historical texts, peer reviewed scholarship, and materialist epistemology. I mention this origin not to cite it as a source, which would be inappropriate, but to honor the collective nature of intellectual inquiry, wherein even fleeting questions can spark sustained investigation. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues at the University of Havana. Special thanks to the scholars whose work shapes this monograph: J. D. Bernal, Gaston Bachelard, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin, giants on whose shoulders we stand, and to contemporary thinkers like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, and Richard Levins, who keep dialectical materialism alive in our times. I also thank the students and teachers in Cuban classrooms who participate, knowingly or not, in the living laboratory of emancipatory education. Their resilience and curiosity reaffirm that science and philosophy, at their best, are tools for human dignity. Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal iv ABSTRACT This monograph argues that philosophy, far from being a decorative or obsolete appendage to scientific practice, is a necessary condition for theoretical innovation, particularly when scientific paradigms reach their limits. From a historical materialist and Marxist standpoint, scientific knowledge is not produced in a vacuum but is shaped by sociohistorical conditions, class interests, and prevailing ideological frameworks. Philosophy, especially dialectical materialism, offers not only heuristic tools but also critical lenses to expose the social embeddedness of scientific practice and to overcome what Gaston Bachelard called “epistemological obstacles.” Drawing on the work of Engels, Lenin, Max Jammer, and contemporary Marxist epistemologists, this essay demonstrates how philosophical reflection, rooted in material reality and historical development, enables science to transcend the blind spots of positivism and instrumentalism, thereby fostering genuine theoretical breakthroughs. Keywords: philosophy of science, dialectical materialism, epistemological obstacles, scientific innovation, historical materialism Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal v Resumen Esta monografía sostiene que la filosofía, lejos de ser un apéndice decorativo u obsoleto de la práctica científica, constituye una condición necesaria para la innovación teórica, especialmente cuando los paradigmas científicos alcanzan sus límites. Desde una perspectiva materialista histórica y marxista, el conocimiento científico no se produce en el vacío, sino que está configurado por condiciones sociohistóricas, intereses de clase y marcos ideológicos dominantes. La filosofía, en particular el materialismo dialéctico, ofrece no solo herramientas heurísticas, sino también lentes críticos para revelar la inserción social de la práctica científica y superar lo que Gaston Bachelard denominó “obstáculos epistemológicos”. Basándose en las obras de Engels, Lenin, Max Jammer y epistemólogos marxistas contemporáneos, este ensayo demuestra cómo la reflexión filosófica, arraigada en la realidad material y en el desarrollo histórico, permite a la ciencia trascender los puntos ciegos del positivismo y el instrumentalismo, favoreciendo así auténticos avances teóricos. Palabras clave: filosofía de la ciencia, materialismo dialéctico, obstáculos epistemológicos, innovación científica, materialismo histórico Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal vi Resumo Esta monografia argumenta que a filosofia, longe de ser um apêndice decorativo ou obsoleto da prática científica, é uma condição necessária para a inovação teórica, especialmente quando os paradigmas científicos atingem seus limites. Do ponto de vista materialista histórico e marxista, o conhecimento científico não é produzido no vácuo, mas é moldado por condições socio-históricas, interesses de classe e quadros ideológicos dominantes. A filosofia, em especial o materialismo dialético, oferece não apenas ferramentas heurísticas, mas também lentes críticas para expor o enraizamento social da prática científica e superar aquilo que Gaston Bachelard chamou de “obstáculos epistemológicos”. Com base nas obras de Engels, Lenin, Max Jammer e epistemólogos marxistas contemporâneos, este ensaio demonstra como a reflexão filosófica, fundamentada na realidade material e no desenvolvimento histórico, permite à ciência transcender os pontos cegos do positivismo e do instrumentalismo, promovendo assim avanços teóricos genuínos. Palavras-chave: filosofia da ciência, materialismo dialético, obstáculos epistemológicos, inovação científica, materialismo histórico Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal 1 1. INTRODUCTION The idea that science can or should operate independently of philosophy is not only historically inaccurate but ideologically charged. This notion, widespread among contemporary practitioners, policymakers, and even segments of the scientific establishment, presents itself as a mark of modernity: the triumph of empirical method over speculative abstraction, of data over dogma. Yet this supposed liberation from philosophy conceals a deeper entanglement, not with metaphysical speculation in the pejorative sense, but with unexamined assumptions about reality, knowledge, and social order. As Max Jammer (1979) rightly observed, the claim that science is “philosophically neutral” is itself a philosophical assertion, often reflecting a positivist epistemology that privileges operational definitions, quantifiability, and instrumental utility while dismissing questions of ontology, historical context, or social embeddedness. From a Marxist and materialist standpoint, this neutrality is not merely naïve. It is symptomatic of a broader transformation in the social organization of knowledge under capitalism. In The Social Function of Science, J. D. Bernal (1939/2020) argued that science, far from being a disinterested pursuit of truth, is deeply interwoven with the economic and political structures of its time. The professionalization and compartmentalization of scientific disciplines in the twentieth century, accelerated by military industrial funding, corporate research and development, and the logic of intellectual property, have fostered a culture of technical specialization that marginalizes critical reflection. Philosophy, in this context, is not so much rejected as rendered superfluous. If the goal of science is no longer to understand the world in its totality but to generate solutions, often proprietary, to narrowly defined problems, then questioning the premises of those problems appears inefficient, even subversive. And yet, precisely at moments when science confronts its own limits, when anomalies accumulate, paradigms fracture, or new domains of inquiry emerge, philosophy reasserts Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal 2 its necessity.Carlo Rovelli (as cited in Brockman, 2014, p. 78) captures this dynamic vividly: “Heisenberg would have never done quantum mechanics without being full of philosophy… Einstein would have never done relativity without having read all the philosophers” (in Brockman, 2014, p. 78). These were not idle intellectual indulgences. They were essential engagements with the conceptual scaffolding of reality. Einstein’s break with Newtonian absolute time, for instance, was not driven solely by experimental data but by a philosophical interrogation of simultaneity shaped by Hume’s empiricism and Mach’s critique of metaphysical entities (Stachel, 2002). Similarly, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle emerged not just from mathematical formalism but from a profound rethinking of what it means to “observe” and “know”—questions steeped in Kantian and Platonic traditions. But for a materialist, the relevance of philosophy cannot be reduced to individual genius or abstract dialogue with canonical texts. What matters is how philosophical frameworks articulate the contradictions of material life. Friedrich Engels (1876-1886/1987), in Dialectics of Nature, insisted that nature itself is dialectical, characterized by motion, contradiction, transformation, and interconnection. The task of science, then, is not to impose static categories onto a passive world but to grasp processes in their historical unfolding. This requires a philosophy that is not external to science but immanent to its practice, a philosophy that is, in Lenin’s (1908/1962) words, “the logic of scientific discovery” under conditions of class society. In capitalist epistemology, however, science is often severed from this dialectical logic. It becomes fragmented into isolated domains, governed by methodological individualism in the social sciences, reductionism in the life sciences, or computational formalism in physics and artificial intelligence. The result is what Gaston Bachelard (1938/2002) called “epistemological obstacles”: ingrained habits of thought that masquerade as self evident truths but actually block deeper understanding. Examples abound, such as the myth of the Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal 3 “blank slate” in education, the illusion of neural determinism in cognitive science, or the fantasy of value free algorithms in data science. These are not merely scientific errors. They are ideological formations that naturalize social hierarchies, obscure historical contingency, and depoliticize technical decisions. Dialectical materialism offers a way out. As a philosophy rooted in the material conditions of human existence and the historical development of productive forces, it provides both a critique of existing scientific paradigms and a method for their transformation. It does not seek to replace empirical research with speculation but to situate that research within a broader framework of social and natural totality. In doing so, it enables scientists to recognize the hidden assumptions that shape their questions, methods, and interpretations, and to imagine alternatives. Given this context, this monograph is guided by the following central question: How can philosophy, particularly when grounded in historical and dialectical materialism, contribute to the innovation and development of scientific theory in conditions shaped by capitalist epistemology? To address this question, the study pursues the following objectives: 1. To critically examine the historical role of philosophy in major scientific revolutions, demonstrating that theoretical breakthroughs have consistently emerged through dialectical engagement with philosophical frameworks rather than through methodological isolation. 2. To analyze the ideological function of the doctrine of “philosophical neutrality” in contemporary science, showing how this stance obscures the sociohistorical conditions of knowledge production and reinforces epistemological obstacles rooted in bourgeois thought. Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal 10 Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) marked the culmination of the scientific revolution, but it was also a philosophical project. Newton explicitly framed his work as a response to René Descartes’s vortex theory, engaging in sustained metaphysical debate about the nature of space, force, and divine action (Cohen, 1980). While Newton retained theological notions, such as absolute space as “God’s sensorium,” his system nonetheless provided a unified, law-governed universe that mirrored the centralized, rationalized state emerging in post-Restoration England. From a Marxist standpoint, Newtonian mechanics reflected the ideological needs of early capitalism: a world governed by universal, immutable laws, where bodies, like commodities, interacted through external forces in predictable ways. This “metaphysical” worldview, as Engels (1987) later critiqued it, treated nature as static and isolated, ignoring internal contradictions and historical development. Yet it was historically necessary. It enabled the Industrial Revolution by making motion, energy, and force calculable and controllable (Bernal, 2010). Thus, Newton’s philosophy was both a scientific breakthrough and a classspecific representation of nature. Einstein and the Relativity of Space-Time The crisis of Newtonian physics in the late 19th century did not stem from a lack of data but from a failure of its philosophical foundations. The Michelson and Morley (1887) experiment had already shown the absence of the luminiferous ether, yet physicists continued to uphold the notion of absolute space until Einstein’s (1905) theory of special relativity redefined the problem on philosophical grounds. Drawing on Ernst Mach’s critique of Newton’s absolutes and David Hume’s skepticism about causality, Einstein rejected metaphysical entities in favor of operational definitions, using synchronized clocks and rigid rods to define time and space (Stachel, 2002). This was not “mere philosophy” but a conceptual revolution that restructured physics. Special relativity revealed that space and time are not independent containers but Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal 11 interwoven dimensions of a single spacetime continuum, whose structure depends on the observer’s state of motion. Lenin (1962) recognized the materialist core of this insight, arguing that Einstein’s theory, despite being misinterpreted by idealists like Henri Poincaré, objectively advanced dialectical materialism by demonstrating the relational, objective character of physical reality (p. 248). Einstein’s philosophical preparation was indispensable. Without his engagement with Mach’s positivism and Kant’s epistemology, he could not have broken free from the “epistemological obstacle” of absolute simultaneity (Bachelard, 2002). Thus, relativity emerged not from data alone but from a dialectical engagement between empirical anomaly and philosophical critique. Heisenberg and the Quantum Turn Werner Heisenberg’s (1927) uncertainty principle marked another rupture that defied classical intuition. Yet Heisenberg himself attributed his breakthrough to philosophical reflection. In Physics and Philosophy, he wrote that “modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato” in its recognition that mathematical forms, not sensory images, constitute the foundation of reality (Heisenberg, 1958, p. 163). He also acknowledged Immanuel Kant’s influence, noting that at the quantum level, the observer is inseparable from the observed system, thereby challenging the Cartesian subject–object split that underpinned classical science. This philosophical shift had profound implications. Quantum mechanics revealed that particles do not possess definite properties until measured, that causality is probabilistic, and that complementarity, not contradiction, characterizes microphysical reality. Positivists like the Vienna Circle interpreted this as the end of realism, but dialectical materialists saw it differently. Engels (1987) had already anticipated such developments by arguing that matter is not passive but active, self-moving, and self-differentiating. Quantum theory, Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal 12 properly interpreted, did not abolish objectivity but revealed a more complex, dynamic form of it, one aligned with dialectics rather than mechanism (Lenin, 1962). Engels, Lenin, and the Dialectics of Nature Engels first synthesized these insights into a coherent materialist philosophy of science. In Dialectics of Nature, he argued that the laws of dialectics—the transformation of quantity into quality, the interpenetration of opposites, and the negation of the negation—are not imposed on nature but abstracted from its own movement (Engels, 1987). For example, the phase transition from water to ice illustrates the transformation of quantity (temperature change) into quality (state change). The wave–particle duality of light exemplifies the unity of opposites. Lenin extended this analysis in the context of early 20th-century physics. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, he defended philosophical materialism against what he termed the “idealistic interpretations” of new physics, insisting that “the ‘crisis in physics’ is only a crisis of bourgeois idealism” (Lenin, 1962, p. 125). He warned that without a dialectical framework, scientists risked falling into subjectivism or agnosticism. True scientific progress, he argued, requires not the rejection of philosophy but its renewal on materialist foundations. These historical cases confirm a central thesis: scientific revolutions are inseparable from philosophical revolutions. The great scientists were not anti-philosophers; they were philosophers of nature who used conceptual tools to reconfigure reality. The postwar separation of science and philosophy, fostered by Cold War technocracy and capitalist instrumentalism, has led to a crisis of imagination in science, a reliance on data without theory, models without ontology, and innovation without vision (Nowotny et al., 2001). To reclaim scientific creativity, it is necessary to return to the dialectical unity of theory and practice, matter and mind, history and nature. As Marx (1976) declared, the point is not merely to interpret the world but to change it. Science that forgets this risks becoming a tool Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal 13 of domination. Science that embraces it, through the lens of dialectical materialism, becomes a force for emancipation. Given that the historical record confirms philosophical engagement as a necessary condition for scientific transformation, the widespread contemporary marginalization of philosophy within scientific practice demands explanation. This apparent contradiction can be resolved by examining the rise and function of a dominant modern ideology: the claim that science is philosophically neutral. Presented as a hallmark of objectivity, this doctrine asserts that genuine scientific knowledge arises solely from observation and experiment, unshaped by broader worldview commitments. The following chapter interrogates this claim, revealing it not as a description of scientific practice but as an ideological construct. It argues that the myth of neutrality serves to depoliticize knowledge production, obscure the social and historical embeddedness of research, and reinforce the epistemic priorities of capitalist rationality. By analyzing this doctrine’s emergence and function, the critique establishes the imperative to consciously reclaim philosophy as a foundation for emancipatory science. 4. THE MYTH OF PHILOSOPHICAL NEUTRALITY AND ITS IDEOLOGICAL FUNCTION If history demonstrates the constitutive role of philosophy in scientific revolutions, its contemporary marginalization requires explanation. This section therefore examines the doctrine of “philosophical neutrality” and its ideological function. The claim that science can and should operate without philosophy is among the most enduring and consequential illusions of modern scientific culture. Often presented as a hallmark of rigor and objectivity, this doctrine asserts that scientific knowledge arises solely from observation, experimentation, and logical inference, untainted by metaphysical commitments or worldview assumptions. Yet this very claim is itself a philosophical stance, Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal 14 one rooted in logical positivism and instrumentalism, which disguises its ideological character behind a façade of methodological purity (Jammer, 1979). From a historical materialist perspective, such neutrality is not a scientific virtue but an ideological construct. It serves to depoliticize knowledge, obscure the social conditions of research, and reinforce the epistemic dominance of capitalist rationality. Max Jammer (1979) exposed this contradiction with clarity: the idea that science is philosophically neutral presupposes a sharp separation between facts and values, data and theory, method and metaphysics. But as he demonstrated, even the most “technical” scientific concepts, such as force, space, or probability, carry philosophical baggage. Erwin Schrödinger, for instance, maintained that quantum indeterminacy had little to do with a philosophical conception of the world. Jammer retorted that this stance was itself a meta scientific assertion, reflecting a quietist acceptance of empiricist orthodoxy (Jammer, 1979, p. 25). In other words, refusing to engage with philosophy does not eliminate philosophical assumptions; it merely renders them invisible and unchallengeable. This invisibility is precisely where the ideological function of neutrality lies. Under capitalism, science is increasingly organized as a commodity-producing activity, driven by market logic, military priorities, and corporate agendas (Bernal, 1939/2020). In this context, philosophical reflection is seen as inefficient, speculative, or even subversive because it questions the purposes, values, and power relations embedded in scientific practice. To ask whether an algorithm is “neutral,” whether a mathematical model reproduces social bias, or whether a research agenda serves human need or profit motive is to transgress the boundary of “proper” science. Thus, the myth of neutrality functions as a disciplinary mechanism: it confines scientists to technical problem solving while silencing broader ethical and political inquiry (Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons, 2001). J. D. Bernal (1939/2020), in his foundational work The Social Function of Science, argued that all science is socially determined. Even “pure” research, conducted in university Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal 15 laboratories far from industrial applications, is shaped by funding streams, institutional priorities, and prevailing worldviews. The post World War II era saw the consolidation of what Bernal called “science for profit,” in which knowledge production became subordinated to the imperatives of capital accumulation and state security. In this regime, philosophy was not so much rejected as rendered redundant: if the goal of science is to generate patents, optimize systems, or predict behaviors, then ontological questions about the nature of reality or epistemological debates about the limits of knowledge appear irrelevant (Bernal, 1939/2020). Yet this functionalist view of science reproduces what Gaston Bachelard (1938/2002) termed “epistemological obstacles”: deep seated cognitive habits that masquerade as self evident truths but actually block scientific progress. One such obstacle is the belief in data as raw, neutral, and pre theoretical. In reality, data are always already shaped by instruments, categories, and theoretical frameworks. The claim that “the data speak for themselves” obscures the interpretive labor that transforms signals into evidence, numbers into meaning (Benjamin, 2019). Similarly, the myth of the “value free scientist” ignores how researchers’ social position, institutional affiliations, and ideological commitments influence what questions are asked, which methods are deemed valid, and whose knowledge is recognized as legitimate (Santos, 2014). Consider the rise of artificial intelligence. Proponents often describe algorithms as objective, rational, and impartial. Yet critical studies have shown that machine learning systems replicate and amplify racial, gender, and class biases present in training data (Benjamin, 2019). The belief in algorithmic neutrality is not a technical error but an ideological formation that naturalizes inequality by presenting socially constructed outcomes as mathematically inevitable. A philosophically neutral stance would accept this at face value. A dialectical materialist approach, by contrast, interrogates the social relations of data production, the Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal 16 labor hidden in annotation and labeling, and the political economy of platform capitalism that shapes algorithmic design (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020). The same dynamic operates in the life sciences. The “blank slate” model of human cognition, once dominant in psychology and education, claimed that individuals are shaped entirely by environment, with no innate structure. While presented as progressive, this view often ignored the material conditions—poverty, segregation, underfunded schools—that constrain learning. A more dialectical perspective, informed by Lev Vygotsky’s cultural historical theory, sees cognition as emerging from the interaction between biological potential and social practice (Vygotsky, 1934/1987). This framework rejects both biological determinism and environmental idealism, locating development in historically specific activity systems. Yet such integrative approaches are marginalized in mainstream science precisely because they refuse philosophical neutrality and insist on the unity of nature and society. Vladimir Lenin (1908/1962) anticipated this dynamic in his critique of empirio criticism. He argued that the attempt to “purify” science of philosophy only leads to the surreptitious smuggling in of bourgeois idealism. Scientists who declare themselves above metaphysics often adopt uncritically the dominant epistemology of their time—whether mechanistic materialism in the 18th century, positivism in the 19th, or computationalism in the 21st. True scientific integrity, Lenin insisted, requires explicit philosophical commitment: not to dogma, but to a materialist method that recognizes the objective reality of the external world and the social character of knowledge (Lenin, 1908/1962). In sum, the doctrine of philosophical neutrality is neither neutral nor scientific. It is an ideological strategy that protects the status quo by shielding science from critical self reflection. To dismantle this myth is not to abandon empiricism but to deepen it—to recognize that all observation is theory laden, all methods are value oriented, and all science Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal 17 is situated within historical and class relations. Only by rejecting the fiction of neutrality can science become what it ought to be: a collective, democratic, and emancipatory practice. Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal 18 5. CONCLUSION Having critiqued the ideological function of “philosophical neutrality” as a mechanism that obscures the sociohistorical character of scientific knowledge, the monograph proceeds to consider its broader implications. This critique extends beyond theoretical concerns, revealing how dominant scientific practices reproduce core features of capitalist rationality, such as fragmentation, reductionism, and commodification, even while asserting their own objectivity. This analysis establishes the foundation for presenting dialectical materialism as a constructive alternative framework for genuine scientific innovation and emancipatory practice. The monograph maintains that philosophy, particularly when grounded in historical and dialectical materialism, constitutes not a peripheral element but the essential core of scientific practice. Philosophical reflection, when critically engaged and materially grounded, enables science to transcend the limitations of positivism, instrumentalism, and ideological neutrality, thereby fostering rigor and innovation. Historical evidence confirms that every major scientific revolution, from Galileo’s mechanics to Einstein’s relativity and Heisenberg’s quantum theory, emerged through profound philosophical reorientation rather than in spite of it (Bernal, 1939/2020; Stachel, 2002). The subsequent separation of science from philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century does not represent disciplinary maturity; instead, it reflects the instrumentalization of knowledge under late capitalism, a system that privileges technical solutions and market utility over critical understanding and human need (Nowotny et al., 2001). Within this process, the doctrine of “philosophical neutrality” has functioned as a key ideological mechanism. By portraying science as value free, objective, and self sufficient, it obscures the social, historical, and class character of knowledge production (Jammer, 1979). This fiction renders invisible the epistemological obstacles that impede innovation, such as the myth of data as raw fact, the illusion of algorithmic neutrality, the fallacy of the Can Philosophy Drive Scientific Innovation? PhD Candidate Sergio Leal 19 isolated variable, and the naturalization of social hierarchies through biological or computational metaphors (Bachelard, 1938/2002; Benjamin, 2019). These are not simple errors of reasoning but ideological formations that reproduce the logic of capitalist rationality within scientific practice itself. It is noteworthy that critiques of algorithmic bias and data objectivity are not limited to external philosophers or social theorists. Significant voices within computer science, including researchers in fairness, accountability, and transparency (FAccT), have exposed the limitations of ostensibly neutral models and advocated for value sensitive design (Mehrabi et al., 2021; Selbst et al., 2019). While these internal critiques are vital, they often remain constrained by liberal frameworks that seek to correct algorithms without challenging the political economy governing their deployment. A dialectical materialist perspective advances further by situating such technical problems within the broader dynamics of class, empire, and capital accumulation. Dialectical materialism offers a powerful alternative. As a philosophical method grounded in the objective reality of matter in motion, it provides both critical and constructive tools for scientific renewal. It rejects static categories in favor of process, isolation in favor of totality, and linearity in favor of contradiction and qualitative transformation (Engels, 1876/1987). This framework has proven indispensable across diverse fields including theoretical physics, climate science, biology, and mathematics education. For instance, research on functional thinking and digital learning environments has employed this perspective to design pedagogical tools that affirm cognition as a socially mediated, historically situated activity, thereby countering neuromyths that reduce intelligence to innate capacity (Vygotsky, 1934/1987; Ernest, 1998). Similarly, work on modeling awareness as a geometric field has been guided by dialectical materialism to develop a materialist theory of consciousness that avoids both dualism and computationalism, grounding subjective experience in the physical structure of spacetime (Ladyman & Ross, 2007).