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 confusion about our research, which is something we perhaps did not do adequately in our initial article. Interestingly enough, we find ourselves, in dialectical fashion, in agreement with many of the arguments made by the critics (Chan, 2000, this issue; Ho, 2000, this issue; Lee, 2000, this issue)--except those about the validity of our research. Therefore, instead of responding to individual comments, we propose a synthesis that may resolve some of the seeming contradictions between our statements and the statements of the critics.