Mechanisms of Dialectical Change

Mechanisms of change in dialectical behavior therapy: theoretical and empirical observations.

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) can be considered a well-established treatment for borderline personality disorder (BPD) as evidenced by seven well-controlled randomized clinical trials across four independent research teams. The primary purpose of this article is to address a variety of potential mechanisms of change that may be associated with those aspects of DBT that are unique to the tr...

Dialectical responses to questions about dialectical thinking.

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...

Lifespan Cognition: Mechanisms of Change

Elements of dialectical contextualism

In what follows, I strive to present the elements of a philosophical doctrine, which can be defined as dialectical contextualism. I proceed first to define the elements of this doctrine: dualities and polar contraries, the principle of dialectical indifference and the one-sidedness bias. I emphasize then the special importance of this doctrine in one specific field of meta-philosophy: the metho...

Argumentation structures that integrate dialectical and non-dialectical reasoning

Argumentation concepts have been applied to numerous knowledge engineering endeavours in recent years. For example, a variety of logics have been developed to represent argumentation in the context of a dialectical situation such as a dialogue. In contrast to the dialectical approach, argumentation has also been used to structure knowledge. This can be seen as a non-dialectical approach. The To...