I just wrote a review of a new book ‘Dialogue, Argumentation and Education: History, Theory and Practice’ by Baruch Schwarz and Michael Baker[i]. I found this to be generally a good book except for when it came to engaging with my own work. They seemed to interpret my appeal to the importance of dialogue as an end in itself as if it was a political concern with power relations, writing that ‘Wegerif sees in the mediation of the teacher an unbearable power relation imposed on the student’ (p101-102). No. Not at all. My interest is in how teachers and students can learn to step back from their identity images and power games in order to liberate the voice of the dialogue. I am not especially interested in what students want to say, I am much more interested in how to teach them to be able to hear what the dialogue wants to say by which I simply mean being able to learn new things through engaging constructively with other perspectives. This made me think that I must have failed to explain my point clearly enough. So I will try again, briefly, in this blog. Do let me know if my position[ii] becomes clearer or if it still needs more work.
Schwarz and Baker refer often to the dialogical as well as the dialectical nature of argument, writing of this distinction that:
‘the dialectic is generally meant as an exchange between people to handle a disagreement; the dialogical simply means multi-voicedness in language production’ (p103)
They refer to dialogic whenever emotions and ethics come into play. This implies that dialogic – as multivoicedness – is part of the social context of dialectical reasoning. I agree with that but I think that realising that dialectic is embedded within and encompassed by dialogic has bigger implications for understanding argumentation than Schwarz and Baker seem to realise. Let me explain with a story about three distinct ways of thinking about everything or three ‘ontologies’ as we might call them: identity, difference-in-identity and identity-in-difference.
Schwarz and Baker refer often to the dialogical as well as the dialectical nature of argument, writing of this distinction that:
‘the dialectic is generally meant as an exchange between people to handle a disagreement; the dialogical simply means multi-voicedness in language production’ (p103)
They refer to dialogic whenever emotions and ethics come into play. This implies that dialogic – as multivoicedness – is part of the social context of dialectical reasoning. I agree with that but I think that realising that dialectic is embedded within and encompassed by dialogic has bigger implications for understanding argumentation than Schwarz and Baker seem to realise. Let me explain with a story about three distinct ways of thinking about everything or three ‘ontologies’ as we might call them: identity, difference-in-identity and identity-in-difference.
Identity
Figure 1: Identity
Aristotle pointed out the obvious fact that two different objects cannot occupy exactly the same space. Referring to Aristotle, Leibniz derived the more abstract principle of identity or A = A which he used as part of the foundation for classical logic. This is often elaborated as ‘a thing is what it is and not another thing’. I am me, you are you, a tree is a tree, ‘Brexit’ is ‘Brexit’ etc
For many it seems to follow from identity thinking that the correct meaning of a word is its reference to the correct thing that it refers to. A kind of pointing. This is me, that is you, there is a tree ‘Brexit means Brexit’ etc.
Understanding stuff, on this ontology, is essentially representing it correctly. Education leads us to acquire this understanding and tests it in exams. Who am I? Here is my image in a mirror. What is a tree? Here is a picture. What is ‘Brexit’?– here is my conceptual map of the key concepts linked to Brexit, etc, etc.
Dialectic: ‘difference within identity’
Figure 2: A Hegelian type total system (thanks to iawake.blog)
Plato wrote down a number of dialogues that he claimed to have witnessed Socrates engage in with various others. A dialogue has at least one real other person invovled and since you cannot control the other person you cannot predict what they might say and you cannot determine where the dialogue will go. But if you write the dialogue down after the event you start with the conclusion and then you can recall the actual dialogue as if it was a reconstruction of the steps of an argument leading inevitably to the one conclusion that was actually arrived at. While any moment in an actual dialogue has multiple voices in play and multiple paths that could be followed, once they are written down as dialectic there is only one path and only one conclusion. When, in the Republic, Plato describes dialectic as ‘the coping stone that tops our educational system’ (Plato BCE380/1955, p347) he is not referring to living dialogue but to an abstract logical system which offers, he claims, a way of reaching the truth. As Nikulin brings out in his excellent study of the difference between dialogic and dialectic, there is nothing creative in Plato’s dialectic, only ways to criticise claims in order to exclude errors (Nikulin, 2010, p14).
Hegel built on Plato’s dialectic and turned it into the basis of a whole world-view or ontology which he characterised with the phrase ‘difference within identity’. Identity comes first. A thing is what it is. I am I, the tree is a tree, Brexit is Brexit etc. Non-identity or difference is then brought in in the form of an internal contradiction – being can only make sense as a contrast to its negative or non-being. I am only I in contrast to you and to her and to them etc. That is how grammar works. The tree is also defined against what it is not, e.g it is not a cherry stone or a forest. So it seems that a thing is both what it is and not what it is. The tension between incompatibles, being and non-being, is then resolved in a synthesis. For Hegel the 'synthesis' that emerged from the clash of being ('thesis') and non-being (antithesis) was becoming. Thought realises that everything is becoming and becoming involves both being and non-being at the same time but now united in movement. The cherry stone is the tree as ‘becoming tree’ and, in a sense, I am you and you are me united in a larger dynamic system of becoming.
Vygotsky applies Hegels’ dialectic vision directly to human development and education:
‘Thus we may say that we become ourselves through others and that this rule applies not only to the personality as a whole, but also to the history of every individual function. This is the essence of the progress of cultural development expressed in a purely logical form. The personality becomes for itself what it is in itself through what it is for others' (Vygotsky, 1991, p 39).
This is a ‘relational ontology’ going beyond an ‘identity’ or ‘substance ontology’ because things now do not exist separately from their relationships with other things within a larger system. Marx adopted Hegel almost completely and followed Hegel when he described the human individual as the sum total of his social relationships[iii]. Although the system is dynamic it is ultimately closed because there is an end to history, for Hegel the Absolute Notion and for Marx, global communism.
There might not seem much to link the grand world-views of Hegel and Marx to Schwartz and Baker’s modest claim that ‘the dialectic is generally meant as an exchange between people to handle a disagreement’ but if they assume that there is one correct method to use to solve a disagreement and one correct answer to reach then they are also assuming a closed system. I am not sure that they do assume this, even in the context of mathematics education they seem aware that there are many creative ways to do maths. However, they do seem to focus on dialectical argumentation as abstract logical manipulations and not to see that it is possible and valuable to teach more dialogic ways of thinking as seeing and feeling from multiple perspectives in a way which expands consciousness even if it does not always win arguments or always come up with clear solutions to disagreements.
Hegel built on Plato’s dialectic and turned it into the basis of a whole world-view or ontology which he characterised with the phrase ‘difference within identity’. Identity comes first. A thing is what it is. I am I, the tree is a tree, Brexit is Brexit etc. Non-identity or difference is then brought in in the form of an internal contradiction – being can only make sense as a contrast to its negative or non-being. I am only I in contrast to you and to her and to them etc. That is how grammar works. The tree is also defined against what it is not, e.g it is not a cherry stone or a forest. So it seems that a thing is both what it is and not what it is. The tension between incompatibles, being and non-being, is then resolved in a synthesis. For Hegel the 'synthesis' that emerged from the clash of being ('thesis') and non-being (antithesis) was becoming. Thought realises that everything is becoming and becoming involves both being and non-being at the same time but now united in movement. The cherry stone is the tree as ‘becoming tree’ and, in a sense, I am you and you are me united in a larger dynamic system of becoming.
Vygotsky applies Hegels’ dialectic vision directly to human development and education:
‘Thus we may say that we become ourselves through others and that this rule applies not only to the personality as a whole, but also to the history of every individual function. This is the essence of the progress of cultural development expressed in a purely logical form. The personality becomes for itself what it is in itself through what it is for others' (Vygotsky, 1991, p 39).
This is a ‘relational ontology’ going beyond an ‘identity’ or ‘substance ontology’ because things now do not exist separately from their relationships with other things within a larger system. Marx adopted Hegel almost completely and followed Hegel when he described the human individual as the sum total of his social relationships[iii]. Although the system is dynamic it is ultimately closed because there is an end to history, for Hegel the Absolute Notion and for Marx, global communism.
There might not seem much to link the grand world-views of Hegel and Marx to Schwartz and Baker’s modest claim that ‘the dialectic is generally meant as an exchange between people to handle a disagreement’ but if they assume that there is one correct method to use to solve a disagreement and one correct answer to reach then they are also assuming a closed system. I am not sure that they do assume this, even in the context of mathematics education they seem aware that there are many creative ways to do maths. However, they do seem to focus on dialectical argumentation as abstract logical manipulations and not to see that it is possible and valuable to teach more dialogic ways of thinking as seeing and feeling from multiple perspectives in a way which expands consciousness even if it does not always win arguments or always come up with clear solutions to disagreements.
 |  |
Figures 3 and 4: Other possible pictures for a Hegelian system in which identity is given by relationships internal to a complex structured whole patterned in several dimensions.
The dialogic alternative: 'identity within difference'
Bakhtin makes it clear that he thinks of Hegel’s dialectic as a threat to meaning (1986 p103)
‘If we transform dialogue into one continuous text, that is, erase the divisions between voices (changes of speaking subjects), which is possible at the extreme (Hegel's monological dialectic), then the deep-seated (in-finite) contextual meaning disappears’
So what is this ‘deep-seated (infinite) contextual meaning’ that Bakhtin is seeking to preserve from the threat of dialectic?
Bakhtin’s concern is that dialectic, although modelled originally on the experience of dialogue, has forgotten the real source of meaning in dialogues and confused this with an abstract model or picture. It is as if we had replaced the real digestive system with a computer model of the digestive system and then we keep wondering why we feel so hungry all the time.
‘If we transform dialogue into one continuous text, that is, erase the divisions between voices (changes of speaking subjects), which is possible at the extreme (Hegel's monological dialectic), then the deep-seated (in-finite) contextual meaning disappears’
So what is this ‘deep-seated (infinite) contextual meaning’ that Bakhtin is seeking to preserve from the threat of dialectic?
Bakhtin’s concern is that dialectic, although modelled originally on the experience of dialogue, has forgotten the real source of meaning in dialogues and confused this with an abstract model or picture. It is as if we had replaced the real digestive system with a computer model of the digestive system and then we keep wondering why we feel so hungry all the time.
This model could be animated
and made more 'smart'
but could it ever feed us?
and made more 'smart'
but could it ever feed us?
Real dialogue involves an encounter between people or voices or ‘utterances’ that are outside of each other. I can learn about myself by talking to you and seeing my life through your eyes. But I also learn about you and your difference from me. At the end of the dialogue there is no synthesis in which the difference between us is submerged within a greater identity. I am still me and you are still you but there might be a greater awareness of the possibilities of human life. I want to call this growth an expansion of consciousness where we define consciousness, as its etymology suggests, simply as shared understanding or knowing with others (‘con’ = with and ‘scientia’ = knowledge) This kind of expanded consciousness (also ‘expanded dialogic space’) is not all about that little bit of explicit knowledge that can be put down on paper in an exam. But it is useful nonetheless. The greater the consciousness the more perspectives can be brought to bear on any given problem or issue and the more learnable people become, meaning open to new ideas and able to creatively solve new problems.
Bakhtin agrees with Hegel that the truth is the whole. The true meaning of an utterance, he writes, is found in the whole dialogue. The problem is that this is a living dialogue that has not yet ended! (p146) We might think we have found the truth of things only for the next utterance to completely re-interpret everything that has gone before. There are in fact always many voices in play and always many possibilities with no final conclusion possible, no ‘last word’ as Bakhtin put it.
Like dialectic, this dialogic vision implies a relational ontology. But switching from ‘difference within identity’ to ‘identity within difference’ means that there is no longer a completed system to refer to as a guarantor of truth. [iv] Of course we think we are going somewhere and we think that there is progress but all such thinking is relative to context and might be proved wrong by the next turn in the road so it is wise to be a bit humble about claims and to be open to the possibility that we might have something to learn from others even from those who initially seem very different from us.
Bakhtin makes it clear what this dialogic world-view means for claims such as ‘Brexit means Brexit’[v],
'Contextual meaning is potentially infinite, but it can only be actualized when accompanied by another (other's) meaning, if only by a question in the inner speech of the one who understands.. …. There can be no "contextual meaning in and of itself"—it exists only for another contextual meaning, that is, it exists only in conjunction with it. Therefore, there can be neither a first nor a last meaning; it always exists among other meanings as a link in the chain of meaning, …'(p145-146).
In other words Brexit does not have one meaning but it means different things in different contexts depending on the questions that are asked about it by different people with different histories and different agendas. If we are given the task of teaching what ‘Brexit’ means, it would not be honest to define it as if anyone knew the correct answer, it would be better to introduce students to something of the background context and the range of things that people are saying about Brexit. Induct them into the dialogue in other words. The same should apply to all teaching: what we think we know now is always provisional. contextual, multiply voiced and open to new understandings which you, the student, might be responsible for in the future.
The profound significance of the shift from dialectic to dialogic ways of thinking for education is summed up by a phrase from the Christian Bible: ‘the letter kills but the spirit gives life’ (2 Corinthians, 3:6). Ultimately dialectic thinking, like identity thinking, is about closing down and controlling meaning. To claim that the meaning of a thing, idea or person is given by location within a closed system is to kill meaning. To teach that there is only one correct method and only one correct answer is to kill meaning. I write this not because ‘‘Wegerif sees in the mediation of the teacher an unbearable power relation imposed on the student’, not at all, I write this because I want to teach in a way that preserves the possibility of students and teachers living meaningful and creative lives in the light of infinite possibility. And I want to preserve us from the horrors perpetrated by those who think that they know the correct answer and want only to teach it to us.
Bakhtin agrees with Hegel that the truth is the whole. The true meaning of an utterance, he writes, is found in the whole dialogue. The problem is that this is a living dialogue that has not yet ended! (p146) We might think we have found the truth of things only for the next utterance to completely re-interpret everything that has gone before. There are in fact always many voices in play and always many possibilities with no final conclusion possible, no ‘last word’ as Bakhtin put it.
Like dialectic, this dialogic vision implies a relational ontology. But switching from ‘difference within identity’ to ‘identity within difference’ means that there is no longer a completed system to refer to as a guarantor of truth. [iv] Of course we think we are going somewhere and we think that there is progress but all such thinking is relative to context and might be proved wrong by the next turn in the road so it is wise to be a bit humble about claims and to be open to the possibility that we might have something to learn from others even from those who initially seem very different from us.
Bakhtin makes it clear what this dialogic world-view means for claims such as ‘Brexit means Brexit’[v],
'Contextual meaning is potentially infinite, but it can only be actualized when accompanied by another (other's) meaning, if only by a question in the inner speech of the one who understands.. …. There can be no "contextual meaning in and of itself"—it exists only for another contextual meaning, that is, it exists only in conjunction with it. Therefore, there can be neither a first nor a last meaning; it always exists among other meanings as a link in the chain of meaning, …'(p145-146).
In other words Brexit does not have one meaning but it means different things in different contexts depending on the questions that are asked about it by different people with different histories and different agendas. If we are given the task of teaching what ‘Brexit’ means, it would not be honest to define it as if anyone knew the correct answer, it would be better to introduce students to something of the background context and the range of things that people are saying about Brexit. Induct them into the dialogue in other words. The same should apply to all teaching: what we think we know now is always provisional. contextual, multiply voiced and open to new understandings which you, the student, might be responsible for in the future.
The profound significance of the shift from dialectic to dialogic ways of thinking for education is summed up by a phrase from the Christian Bible: ‘the letter kills but the spirit gives life’ (2 Corinthians, 3:6). Ultimately dialectic thinking, like identity thinking, is about closing down and controlling meaning. To claim that the meaning of a thing, idea or person is given by location within a closed system is to kill meaning. To teach that there is only one correct method and only one correct answer is to kill meaning. I write this not because ‘‘Wegerif sees in the mediation of the teacher an unbearable power relation imposed on the student’, not at all, I write this because I want to teach in a way that preserves the possibility of students and teachers living meaningful and creative lives in the light of infinite possibility. And I want to preserve us from the horrors perpetrated by those who think that they know the correct answer and want only to teach it to us.
 |  Figures 6 and 7: possible images for meaning from the dialogic ontology view, a spark across the difference between inside and outside views, not exactly random but always new, always creative and always illuminating new depths of potential meaning |
Notes and references
[i] Kerslake and Wegerif, review of Dialogue, Argumentation and Education: History, Theory and Practice’ by Baruch Schwarz and Michael Baker (2016, Cambridge University Press). To appear in next issue of Thinking Skills and Creativity.
[ii] Wegerif, R (2008) Dialogic or Dialectic? The significance of ontological assumptions in research on Educational Dialogue. British Educational Research Journal 34(3), 347-361. http://elac.ex.ac.uk/dialogiceducation/userfiles/DialOrDialBERJ(1).pdf
[iii] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm
[iv] This switch in ontology is what is implied by the term ‘post-structuralism’ – structuralism tended to see meaning as about contextual relationships within a bounded system or whole, post-structuralism agreed with this but removed the boundary. See eg Derrida http://www.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f13/DrrdaSSP.pdf
[v] A phrase recently asserted repeatedly by the UK Prime Minister Teresa May.
Nikulin, D. (2010). Dialectic and Dialogue. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Vygotsky, L. (1986). Thought and language (A. Kozulin, trans.). Cambridge MA: MIT.
Press;
Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas
Plato (1955) The Republic. Penguin Classics.
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