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A philosophical position that combines dialectical materialism’s emphasis on change, contradiction, and historicity with a robust realism: there is a material world independent of our thoughts, but our knowledge of it is always mediated, partial, and evolving through practice. Unlike naive realism, it acknowledges that observation is theory‑laden and that reality appears in historical forms; unlike relativism, it maintains that some accounts are better than others in terms of their practical adequacy and explanatory power. Historical‑dialectical realism underpins the Marxist epistemology of “concrete universal” and “reproduction of the concrete in thought.” It argues that reality is not static but processual—things are what they are in virtue of their development and internal contradictions.
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