In this essay I describe the abstract logic of dialectical systems. I recognize that my description may be too abstract (not to mention tentative) to be of much use by itself. Even so, it will be helpful for the reader’s general understanding of dialectical structures if I point out certain abstract, general features of them, and in any case I mean this description to be used in conjunction wit...

Debate about our article on culture and dialectical thinking (Peng & Nisbett, September 1999) exemplifies a thousand-yearold Confucian saying: If the participants in an intellectual discourse have different understandings about the topic in question, then the conversation will surely get difficult. Being the perpetrators who opened this Pandora's box, we feel obligated to clarify some of the co...

The multi-perspective decision-making paradigm [2, 15, 9] is extended to include a dialectical process to assist in developing decision support systems in “wicked” situations with much conflict among stakeholder groups. A dialectical methodology is proposed and applied to a wicked decision problem namely, urban infrastructure management, to illustrate the model. The dialectical analysis highlig...

Chinese ways of dealing with seeming contradictions result in a dialectical or compromise approach— retaining basic elements of opposing perspectives by seeking a “middle way.” European-American ways, on the other hand, deriving from a lay version of Aristotelian logic, result in a differentiation model that polarizes contradictory perspectives in an effort to determine which fact or position i...

OBJECTIVE The effects of dialectical behavior therapy adapted for the treatment of binge/purge behaviors were examined. METHOD Thirty-one women (averaging at least one binge/purge episode per week) were randomly assigned to 20 weeks of dialectical behavior therapy or 20 weeks of a waiting-list comparison condition. The manual-based dialectical behavior therapy focused on training in emotion r...

Using tools like argument diagrams and profiles of dialogue, this paper studies a number of examples of everyday conversational argumentation where determination of relevance and irrelevance can be assisted by means of adopting a new dialectical approach. According to the new dialectical theory, dialogue types are normative frameworks with specific goals and rules that can be applied to convers...

Checkland's Soft Systems Methodology for defining and solving problems in organizations is presented on the basis of an application of the methodology. In many ways this approach represents an improvement in relation to more traditional approaches to computer-based information systems. Based on an experiment we explore the possibilities of combining the practical usefulness of soft systems thin...

abstract purpose: initially, reading challenges related to the web environment will be discussed in the current paper followed by describing four reading modes including exegetical, dogmatic, agnostic and dialectical which have been proposed by walter kaufman. the research aimed to examine such modes of reading in the web environment via a questionnaire distributed among the postgraduate studen...