Transformations are performed through the following dialectical acts (Krasheninnikov, 2005):
- Dialectical transformation. For any objects, ideas, phenomena, situations, a person finds oppositional ones.
- Dialectical integration. In the structure of any object or situation a person establishes the presence of oppositions that mutually disaffirm each oth- er. There can be several pairs of this kind, and each of them characterizes prominent features of the object.
- Dialectical mediation. For any pair of oppositions a person finds or con- structs an object in which these oppositions are present simultaneously.
- Dialectical seriation. A person regards any object or situation as intermedi- ate between the initial condition and the final condition, which is the op- posite of the initial one.
- Dialectical transaction. While exploring a process, a person can regard it in reverse order: that which was initially considered as an end of the process is regarded as its beginning, and the initial condition is understood as the final one.
- Dialectical change of alternative. A person regards an object in the context of one pair of oppositions and in the context of another pair.
- Dialectical identification. A person first sees objects and phenomena as oppositional and then establishes their identity and similarity.
- Dialectical dis-identification. The things initially seen as identical now are understood as oppositional.
What is Absent But Implied?
Focus on experiencing your own thinking
- When you say “The rose is red”, what do you experience in your mind?
- More precisely, what are the conceptual implications you experience that you don’t spell out?
- Dialectics conceptually spells out these implications.
- It essentially spells out “absences” – what is not there right now – that which emerges only after further reflection by using related thought forms.
- Not to spell out these implications in dialectical commentary counts as DIALECTICAL ERROR (Hegel; Adorno; Sartre; Bhaskar).
- In light of dialectics, scientific theories and conceptual frameworks are potentially full of dialectical errors of various kinds.
Thought Forms Remediate Absences
in Thought by Opening Minds
A dialectical comment [or narrative] on the ROSE is one in which the sense and meaning of <rose> is not fixed but open, and comes to be understood in its fullness only through using all pertinent dialectical thought forms that render its REALITY:
- the soil it grows in [Process]
- the environment it is part of [garden, community, region; [Context]
- the relationship to surrounding plants with which together it forms an ecology [Relationship]
- and the cycles of its transformations from seed to seedling to plant to blossom to group of petals fallen from the stem.
However, dialectics is not associative: it is either critical (P, R) or constructive (C, T)!