Page:Mortimer J. Adler - Dialectic.pdf/3

I need only appeal to the pleasures and discomforts which most human beings have experienced in conversation and argument to justify the intention of this book, It is an attempt to examine the circumstances and conditions of controversy in order to understand what are its inescapable limitations, its intellectual traits and values. If the importance of conversation seems to be exaggerated by making it the theme of so elaborate an analysis, the implications of that analysis may bring the doubtful reader to share in my estimate of controversial discourse as one of the actual occasions of the life of reason, however and wherever else it may occur.

Dialectic is a convenient technical name for the kind of thinking which takes place when human beings enter into dispute, or when they carry on in reflection the polemical consideration of some theory or idea. It is presented here as a methodology significantly different from the procedure of the empirical scientist or the method of the mathematician. It is an intellectual process in which all men engage in so far as they undertake to be critical of their own opinions, or the opinions of others, and are willing to face the difficulties that arise in communication because of the opposition and conflict of diverse insights. Dialectic is relevant to human affairs whenever men find themselves in agreement or disagreement over matters of theory. It is not only a method of dealing with disagreements, but an attitude to be taken toward agreement which interprets it as merely relative to the situation in which it is achieved.

I am in the unusual position of being genuinely indifferent as to whether the readers of this book accept