80 SOCIAL SCIENHST laws of objective reality and thus equip? th3 spccializ-ed sciences with a general method of cognition and transformation of reality. Dialectical materialism makes no claims "to be able to solve the specific problem studied by the sciences of nature, but it does develop in close contact with them" (p 9). Similarly, natural sciences do not undertake philosophical investigation of specialized problems arising from the advance of the sciences themselves; yet it is not possible to find the right approach to any methodological problem of the science without a creative alliance with philosophy. It is because of the reciprocal creative alliance between science and philosophy that dialectical materialism need not create "philosophy of science" as a specialized branch of philosophy. The philosophy itself becomes a truly scientific philosophy "an all embracing integrated system of laws and categories." (p 9). Oizerman argues that "the status of philosophy in the history of man's intellectual development is in no small degree determined by the fact that, on the one hand it is investigation while, on the other, it is a form of social consciousness like art, religion and so on" (p 22). As an investigation, as a cognitive process, it resembles any other science and includes within it an appraisal of the significance of knowledge beyond the boundaries of any special field of knowledge. It is when philosophy as a form of social consciousness is subjected to scientific enquiry that it becomes scientific philosophy. Thus Marxist philosophy acquires its scientific character by introducing within it the historical self-consciousness of philosophy itself. In the face of a scientific philosophy, which demands theoretical premises of dialectical and historical materialism, the divergence or plurality of philosophical doctrines becomes a historically transient phenomenon which, at the same time, does not deny its necessary and progressive nature in certain historical epochs. A number of articles discuss the problem of relationship between philosophy and ideology, and elucidate the concept of scientific ideology. Anumer of bourgeois social theorists and revisionist Marxists have attempted to deny the very possibility of scientific ideology. Arguing against such philosophers, scientific ideology is defined as "a system of regulative ideas, ideals, imperatives, based on a specialised investigation of the social process, which reflects the positions, needs, interests and aspirations of a definite class, social group or the whole of society and gives them their permanent social orientation. Social theory is an ideology