1. Introduction When I grew up, in second half of last century, two sets of statements below would be considered common knowledge. 1. Scientists justify their claims by means of logic and systematic observation. They do not take anything on faith. They are skeptical towards their own claims and always ready to re-examine them. If a justification fails they abandon their claims, or clearly mark them as mere speculative possibilities. They avoid vagueness and abhor contradiction. They are irreverent to authoritative views. They define their terms and employ mathematics to achieve maximum clarity. Etc., etc. 2. Religious scholars, mystical philosophers, and ideologists of all kind take their claims on faith. They cannot and do not want to justify them either logically or empirically. To convince others, they use rhetorical eloquence, coercion, and brainwashing instead of justification. They are insensitive to contradiction and thrive in vagueness. They defer to authority. Etc., etc. Now, presently defunct country where I grew up had an official ideology variably called Marxism-Leninism and dialectical and historical materialism. Even as a young boy I knew that of two sets of statements above, this ideology conformed squarely to second. But I also knew that it was using all those devices--rhetorical eloquence, coercion, and brainwashing--to convince people it fit within first category, as the only scientific ideology. Later on, still young but no longer a boy, I had occasions to talk to some orthodox and not-so-orthodox Marxists, mostly professors at my university. I formed an impression that those of them who were sophisticated scholars and at same time seriously believed in dialectical and historical materialism (because many merely pretended they did to earn their bread and butter), clearly understood that it did not conform with above-given Set of Statements 1. One group of them believed, however, that Set of Statements 1 does not characterize science either, that these statements were but obsolete remnants of Enlightenment era. Scientists too take a lot of things on faith, they would say. Just think of axioms in mathematics. They too defer to authoritative views. They too violate logic or disregard systematic evidence when it does not suit prevailing paradigms (a translation of Kuhn's book had just appeared and, as everywhere else in world, was enthusiastically used to support all kinds of views disparaging science). In short, dialectical and historical materialism had right to be vague, self-contradictory, and empirically unfounded, because so was everything else--from physics to biology to psychology. The second group did acknowledge difference between science and dialectical and historical materialism, but maintained that science represented merely a limited perspective, just one of many ways of acquiring truth. Philosophy was supposed to overcome these limitations, propose alternatives to dogmatic confines of logic and empiricism (dialectics being one such alternative). I will label these two positions as you-too position (nobody is perfect) and different but equal position (you say pot[ai]to, I say pot[ah]to). As one can easily surmise, nature of two positions was such that their respective adherents did not consider them incompatible, and in fact readily borrowed each other's arguments (when, for example, asked how surplus value could be a cornerstone of Marxist economic theory if latter did not provide a common measure for two quantities whose difference surplus value was purported to be; or whether there was a principled way of distinguishing Newton's mechanics from physical views of a toddler, or Darwin's theory from Biblical account of biological creation). Both you-too-ists and different-but-equal-ists delighted in finding historical examples (which history indeed provides in abundance) when scientists were grossly wrong, dogmatic, dishonest, or ideologically partisan. …