![]() After I discuss each one, I will have put them together, because they can't be discussed separately. These four facets of dialectic: our activity of concept formation, our pre-conceptual knowing, contradiction, and forced choice, are inter-related facets, of course. ![]() then we are forced to choose against it, despite having thought we wished it. By forced choice I mean that, if what we have wished is shown to result in consequences we do not wish, Our wanting, needing, lacking, or seeking of choice, especially what I shall call "forced choice," in the face of what is presented. Our pre-conceptual knowledge, our knowing already what we seek to define – knowing it sufficiently at least to recognize when something obviously isn't what we seek. Our activity of concept formation or thinking I will organize what I have to say under the following headings: What must I add to this axiomatic deducing from assumed definitions, to get "dialectic"? Science, without philosophy, would be pretty blind. Without philosophy, without this examining and improving of basic definitions, one is simply trapped in whatever concepts one has up to a given time. Of course, ultimately, it isn't too satisfying always simply to use, and never to examine and improve, one's concepts. One might simply be using them, keeping them static and working down from them, for example, in straight-forward mathematics. It is perfectly possible, for Plato, that one would not, for the moment, examine one's concepts. In dialectic one examines one's assumptions, one's basic concepts, and one arrives at better assumptions and concepts. Dialectic is the name Plato gives to his method, to the highest form of thought. ![]()
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