Dialectical Framework Research Articles

Hope in crisis: revisiting Erich Fromm’s dialectic of transformation

In this article we explore Erich Fromm’s concept of hope within the context of contemporary social and political crises. We formulate two primary objections to his vision of a revolution of hope: the individualistic moralisation of societal problems, and the accusation that hope is persuasive and manipulative. By embedding Fromm’s ideas within a broader dialectical framework and engaging with Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on history, we reinterpret hope as a liminal, transformative state rather than a concrete, prescriptive notion. This reconceptualisation presents hope as a fundamental prerequisite for transformative political practice, emphasising its role in fostering active citizenship and collective social change. Ultimately, we argue for the critical importance of hope in navigating and overcoming the challenges of modernity.

Hegel, Selbstischkeit, and the experiential self

ABSTRACT In this essay, I offer a corrective to the standard reading of Hegel as a social constructivist when it comes to matters of the self by shifting the focus from the Phenomenology to his ‘Philosophy of Spirit’ and ‘Anthropology.’ There, a kind-of self or Selbstischkeit is revealed, anticipating the pre-reflective, experiential of the likes of Zahavi and, by extension, Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. I argue that Hegel's conception of the self enhances our understanding of the relationship between the pre-reflective, experiential self and the self of self-consciousness, contributing to the discourse on the continuity between biological and mental life. The self, as it emerges in consciousness, traces its origins to a primarily bodily selfness which is foundational to psychical life. Habit emerges as a vital bridge between this selfness and the self of self-consciousness, offering a dynamic, dialectical framework for thinking the development of the self of self-consciousness in and out of its bodily context.

AI and its implications for research in higher education: a critical dialogue

ABSTRACT This article weighs in on the developing discourse on AI's role in higher education research through a structured dialogue between two diametrically opposed academics. Utilising a dialectical framework, the discourse transcends surface-level debates to grapple with ethical, methodological, and epistemological questions that are often overlooked, but are paramount to the field's integrity. Russell advocates for AI as an indispensable tool for academic research, while Rachel raises critical questions about AI’s potential to undermine the very essence of academic inquiry. Through this disputation, the article reveals the complex tensions between efficiency and ethical concerns, between innovation and integrity. Rather than offer facile solutions, it exposes the intricate challenges and invites the reader to consider the broader implications for academic research practice. The article serves as a catalyst for a more rigorous, nuanced dialogue, aiming to shift the discourse from the technological to the ethical and epistemological. It is an imperative read for anyone committed to understanding the transformational potential and pitfalls of AI in higher education research.

An encoding of abstract dialectical frameworks into higher-order logic

Abstract An approach for encoding abstract dialectical frameworks and their semantics into classical higher-order logic is presented. Important properties and semantic relationships are formally encoded and proven using the proof assistant Isabelle/HOL. This approach allows for the computer-assisted analysis of abstract dialectical frameworks using automated and interactive reasoning tools within a uniform logic environment. Exemplary applications include the formal analysis and verification of meta-theoretical properties, and the generation of interpretations and extensions under specific semantic constraints.

Narrative selfies and player–character intimacy in interface games

This paper discusses the use of selfies in narrative-driven interface games, that is games that place the narrative within fictionalized interfaces resembling those of computers or smartphones, as methods of creating intimacy between the characters and the player, while simultaneously maintaining the player’s separateness as a witness of personal stories, rather than their active actor. The article analyses how inter-character and player–character intimacy and emotional distance can be negotiated through the implementation of selfies into the narrative within interface games. The inherent intimacy of such games, which often tell personal stories of people of marginalized identities, is juxtaposed with the constrictions on the player’s agency—both in the overall gameplay and in their inability to take the selfies themselves. Three games are discussed according to three frameworks used to discuss selfies as noted by Gabriel Faimau (2020): a dramaturgic lens (the selfie as self-presentation), a sociosemiotic approach (the selfie as an art of communication), and a dialectical framework (selfie as a social critique).

Expressiveness of SETAFs and support-free ADFs under 3-valued semantics

Generalising the attack structure in argumentation frameworks (AFs) has been studied in different ways. Most prominently, the binary attack relation of Dung frameworks has been extended to the notion of collective attacks. The resulting formalism is often termed SETAFs. Among the generalisations of AFs, abstract dialectical frameworks (ADFs) allow for a systematic and flexible generalisation of AFs in which different kinds of logical relations, e.g. attack and support, among arguments can be represented. Restricting the logical relations among arguments leads to different subclasses of ADFs of interest. In this work, we consider so-called support-free ADFs that allow for all kinds of attacks but no support or other relations and SETADFs that embed SETAFs in the ADF setting. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the relation between these two different approaches. To this end, we investigate and compare the expressiveness of SETAFs and support-free ADFs under the lens of 3-valued semantics. Our results show that it is only the presence of unsatisfiable acceptance conditions in support-free ADFs that discriminates the two approaches.

Playing by the rules: The management of WhatsApp surveillance among romantically involved mobile phone users at a South African University

Even though there are high and growing levels of penetration of mobile telephony in South Africa, there is little research into how mobiles are used in romantic relationships to ‘keep tabs’ on partners and inter alia into how those involved in such relationships may be attempting to achieve and maintain privacy. Using the relational dialectical framework, I study how surveillance and privacy related power dynamics are played out in romantic relationships of a selected undergraduate student cohort at a South African University (n=182). The dialectical framework provides the appropriate empirical lens for investigating how romantic partners deal with the need to stay both private and public in the wake of instant messaging application WhatsApp. The study sought to understand how adolescents in these romantic relationships deal with mobile privacy conflicts that are brought on by perpetual contact through WhatsApp. Through a quantitative survey, purposive sampling with a confidence level of 95 per cent and 5 per cent margin of error was utilized in selecting the respondents. Exploratory factor and regression analysis shows that rules for managing WhatsApp communication are important for romantic relationship well-being (SD=1.434), albeit not necessarily linked to relational satisfaction.

The budgetary mechanism of the national economic development model: Political aspects

The main objective of the article was to study the legal and economic aspects of the formation of the budgetary mechanism of the national model of economic development. It is possible to ensure the dynamic processes of economic development of Ukraine only through effective regionalization, which significantly increases the requirements for the formation and use of the financial potential of the regions, which requires the development of strategic priorities for public financial management of the region as a whole. The research methodology involved the use of modern theoretical methods of analysis within the framework of dialectics. As a result of the analysis, the key aspects of the budgetary mechanism of the national model of economic development in Ukraine were characterized. It is concluded that, the study has a number of limitations in conducting a purely theoretical analysis. Further research should be devoted to the examination of digital technologies for the formation of the budget mechanism of the national model of economic development, among other aspects.

CONTINUING EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONALIZATION IN POST-MEDIUM COURSES IN EDUCATIONAL ROBOTICS

Approach to Technical Post-Secondary Courses, aiming to analyze the perspectives of the offer as a policy to promote continuing education in the field of professional education, aimed at graduates of technical courses at secondary level. It presents the characterization of the courses and the implementation process, as well as training possibilities in the field of educational robotics. The qualitative research, based on the critical dialectical framework, was based on the theoretical contributions of Gramsci regarding the perspective of a unitary school and Candau regarding the notion of continuing education. Bibliographical research was carried out, complemented by documental research encompassing legislation on Professional and Technological Education, obtained through the Planalto Legis application. Post-medium courses seek to equip technical professionals to carry out specialized services and present notions, fundamentals and practices based on entrepreneurial conduct, permeated by innovation, ethics and social responsibility. In addition, they refine the training of graduates from technical courses, raising opportunities for professional improvement, and, consequently, the human development index, articulating science and innovation, especially in the field of educational robotics.

In Stanisław Lem's Orbit

In Stanisław Lem's Orbit

Remembering the Nation

This thesis traces how national allegory is employed, developed, and altered in the early novels of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Primarily guided by Fredric Jameson’s essay on national allegory and his assertion that the category is “profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogenous representation of the symbol,” this study explores how A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Petals of Blood (1977) reconstruct the dislocated memory of the individual through the traumatic history of the collective, and how this reconnection of the private and public allows for a new imagining of the postcolonial nation. The ambivalent motif of shared cultural memory and its many figurations throughout these novels are investigated extensively. In A Grain of Wheat, the motif of betrayal, experienced by nearly every character in the novel, signals an ironic, introspective turn on national unity and an examination of the unfulfilled promises of the Mau Mau’s decolonial struggle. Told through the characters’ individual flashbacks to one another, principally through the arch-traitor Mugo, the memory of betrayal is seen as simultaneously the hollowing of social bonds and the basis for collective regeneration, with the survivors of the Emergency recognizing and negotiating the pitfalls of national consciousness while dedicating themselves to redeeming those who sacrificed their lives for it. Benedict Anderson’s essay on memory and forgetting and Frantz Fanon’s critique of the national leader are vital components to this discussion of how the novel employs the motif of betrayal and memory in order to counter the mandate by Jomo Kenyatta to “forgive and forget” the Mau Mau’s struggle against Kenyan loyalists and colonial occupants. Whereas A Grain of Wheat was primarily concerned with the immediate aftermath of independence on the national psyche, Petals of Blood directs our attention to the epic volume of history and the metamorphoses that the nation undergoes in its constant battle against imperialism and its desire for unity. The ambivalent motif of betrayal in A Grain of Wheat is mirrored by the motifs of ceremony, fire, and education in Petals of Blood, which are employed to construct a Janus-faced history of the nation exploited by the neocolonial government for its self-interest, and intervened upon by the workers and peasantry to cultivate a tradition of renewed resistance. Anderson’s essay on Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History is discussed in reference to how the postcolonial nation inherits the state from its predecessor, and Fanon and Ngũgĩ’s essays on national culture are considered for their dialectical frameworks of history and the cultivation of “combat literature.” In both these novels of his early career, Ngũgĩ sought to imagine how the nation could rejuvenate the energy and idealism of the Mau Mau uprising and empower the Kenyan workers and peasantry into a different, more equitable, socialist mode of the nation. To see the complete thesis, please visit https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/fq977w193.

Producing transformations to study them

Concepts are at the core of human psychological experience. By means of them, we can communicate, understand and collaborate with each other. Within each community, concepts have been learned and can be taught. They are of capital importance for education in every level and for work activities. Concepts have been the object of study of different disciplines and in different contexts for many years. Despite their importance and the attention they have received, both common sense and psychological science understand concepts in an oversimplified way that has consequences for research and teaching. Early in the past century, Vygotsky studied the phenomena of concepts and their development in what ended up addressing most of the loose ends that remain in current dominant psychological and educational perspectives. In this article, we review the main, hegemonic perspectives on concepts in psychology, particularly one of the mayor research fields in educational psychology (Research on Conceptual Change), to present later some cross-cutting criticisms to those approaches that will become our touchstone for a sound theory of concepts. Then we present the Vygotskian approach to concept development, and the methodological implications derived from the dialectical framework in which it is inscribed. Finally, extending the Vygotskian approach beyond child development, we present a method developed in French work psychology, the Activity Clinics approach, and its potential for studying the development of concepts in work activities.

Revision, defeasible conditionals and non-monotonic inference for abstract dialectical frameworks

For propositional beliefs, there are well-established connections between belief revision, defeasible conditionals, and nonmonotonic inference. In argumentative contexts, such connections have not yet been investigated. On the one hand, the exact relationship between formal argumentation and nonmonotonic inference relations is a research topic that keeps on eluding researchers despite recently intensified efforts, whereas argumentative revision has been studied in numerous works during recent years. In this paper, we show that relationships between belief revision, defeasible conditionals, and nonmonotonic inference similar to those in propositional logic hold in argumentative contexts as well. We first define revision operators for abstract dialectical frameworks, and use such revision operators to define dynamic conditionals by means of the Ramsey test. We show that such conditionals can be equivalently defined using a total preorder over three-valued interpretations, and study the inferential behaviour of the resulting conditional inference relations.

What Do We Mean by ‘That’s a Fallacious Narrative’?

This paper tries to offer a descriptive account of the normative workings of evaluative fallacy charges directed to narratives. In order to do that, I first defend the continuity and mutual dependence, as based on a dynamical conception of argument, between the ‘belief conception’ and the ‘argumentative conception’ of fallacy. Then, I construe a catalogue of ‘fallacy charges’ based on both such a continuity and the variety of counterarguments explored by the theoretical framework of Argument Dialectics. And finally, I apply these ideas and distinctions in the analysis of four examples of published texts in which the charge of ‘fallacious narrative’ is issued by a discursive agent against other discursive agents’ either full-fledged narratives or narrative assumptions. The analyses confirm some of the characteristics mentioned in the catalogue as well as the argumentative nature of fallacy charges, even when the censored discourse does not exactly or explicitly contain an argument. The analyses also help understand the distinction between a rather concrete ‘linguistic’ use of the term narrative and a more abstract and elusive ‘discursive’ one, in which the difficulties of both identifying the object of censorship and the exact meaning of the fallacy charge multiply.

On acceptance conditions in abstract argumentation frameworks

Dealing with controversial information is an important issue in several application contexts. Formal argumentation enables reasoning on arguments for and against a claim to decide on an outcome. In abstract argumentation frameworks, each argument can be associated with an acceptance condition that may be either implicit (e.g., Dung’s framework where they are encoded in the attack relation) or explicit (e.g., Dialectical Framework where propositional formulae are associated with arguments/statements). Explicit acceptance conditions allow for expressing reasoning tasks in a more natural and compact way. However, in some cases, current argumentation frameworks allowing explicit conditions do not permit to express in a compact and intuitive way some general acceptance conditions, such as those that could be expressed by first-order logic formulae.In this paper, we propose an argumentation framework where arguments’ acceptance conditions allow for checking general properties also concerning sets of arguments/statements by exploiting aggregate functions (e.g., is the number of nearby agents greater than 5?). Notably, though providing such versatile and easily understandable acceptance conditions, the complexity of credulous and skeptical reasoning does not increase w.r.t. that for Dung’s framework under the well-known non-deterministic semantics, i.e., preferred, stable, and least-undefined (a.k.a. semi-stable) semantics.

A Stranger in One’s Own Community

In the Schutzian tradition, Berger and Luckmann expand upon the concept of the stranger and discuss the social reality of ritual purification as a coping strategy for reality-maintaining procedures and mental hygiene whereby individuals reconcile their encounter with a foreigner or stranger and their official reality. Using examples from the trans, gender non-conforming community (TGNC), the central question of this paper is: What about those considered a stranger in their home community? Given the hardships that TGNC people have encountered and continue to face, “unsuccessful socialization” does not offer the best account of their challenges, obstacles, and sufferings when marginalized by others. Advancing Schutzian research, we offer two terms that can be applied to the idea of the stranger: ritual desecration and reverse ritual purification. Using a dialectical framework, a social and interpersonal conflict occurs between ritual purification and ritual desecration. Consequently, two personal iterations emerge: those who experience ritual desecration by remaining in their home environment and those who migrate to another community for the possibility of acceptance and belonging, hence, reverse ritual purification. The iterations between ritual purification, ritual desecration, and reverse ritual purification lead to incremental changes and hardships, potentially creating a new social reality.

Evaluation of a skills-based peer-led art therapy online-group for people with emotion dysregulation

ObjectiveWe developed and piloted a novel art-based online skills program led by a peer mental health professional with lived experience of complex mental health, including Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Key challenges of living with BPD and emotion dysregulation were addressed through artmaking informed by a dialectical framework and skills, to evaluate acceptability and efficacy.MethodA structured, manualised 2-hour weekly arts-based skills program was piloted for people with BPD over 18 weeks. Evaluation included both quantitative and qualitative measures at commencement and completion.ResultsThirty-eight participants enrolled in the program (89.5% identified she/her pronouns, average age 33.6 years), and 31 completed (82% retention). Multilevel modelling analysis of the primary outcome variable Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) demonstrated a large improvement over time (effect size Cohen’s d = 1.77). Qualitative thematic analysis found participants had improved capacity to regulate emotions and tolerate distress, improved connection with others, enhanced understanding of the self, and higher hope for living well. We found that artmaking facilitated processes and helped the expression of difficult emotions, symbolise challenging relationships, and facilitate greater self-understanding. Participants reported high levels of satisfaction, and 77.4% reported that the program had increased wellbeing.ConclusionThis novel artmaking program for emotion dysregulation and BPD was acceptable and potentially effective. Peer facilitation using arts-based skills is a modality of therapy for further investigation.

Transforming Asynchronous Online Discussions with a Structured Conversation System

Research into asynchronous online discussions (AOD) produced conflicting, contradictory results. A central problem was AOD often did not produce a high level of engagement and critical thinking. Synthesizing best practices, a dialectical framework was developed around concrete, actionable levers to improve thinking in online and remote courses. Using a convergent mixed methods triangulation design, a thematic analysis compared AOD for unstructured, structured response system, and the introduction of a structured conversation system, finding a significant improvement using a structured conversation system which incorporated a social and personal component. Instructors needed to organize three levels: the back, the stage, and the front. Applying a typology analysis to AOD, instructors can improve and maintain high levels of critical thinking, engagement, and social interaction.

Strong admissibility for abstract dialectical frameworks

Abstract dialectical frameworks (ADFs) have been introduced as a formalism for modeling argumentation allowing general logical satisfaction conditions and the relevant argument evaluation. Different criteria used to settle the acceptance of arguments are called semantics. Semantics of ADFs have so far mainly been defined based on the concept of admissibility. However, the notion of strongly admissible semantics studied for abstract argumentation frameworks has not yet been introduced for ADFs. In the current work we present the concept of strong admissibility of interpretations for ADFs. Further, we show that strongly admissible interpretations of ADFs form a lattice with the grounded interpretation as the maximal element. We also present algorithms to answer the following decision problems: (1) whether a given interpretation is a strongly admissible interpretation of a given ADF, and (2) whether a given argument is strongly acceptable/deniable in a given interpretation of a given ADF. In addition, we show that the strongly admissible semantics of ADFs forms a proper generalization of the strongly admissible semantics of AFs.

A cost of living: Dialectics of the Necrocene and securing the means of resistance

This article introduces a new dialectical framework of the Necrocene, which presents a binary choice between two possible futures, immediate catastrophe or imminent utopias. The first future, immediate catastrophe, is post-capitalist and post-human underpinned by an adherence to business-as-usual capitalism. The second proposition imminent utopia is imagined as a post-capitalist and post-growth future defined by economics that are eco-socially balanced. Therefore, while the political status quo is predominantly concerned with scrambling to save capitalism and peddling the myth of green growth these dialectics quickly direct us to a profoundly different path. A path defined by a particular eco-socialist perspective on the need to transcend capitalism and its ecocidal growth imperative as a revolutionary necessity. Although this position is not in itself novel to radical socialist and ecological politics, the article finds that an intellectual preoccupation with distant utopias significantly outweighs the practical strategic considerations relating to the messy and uncertain but essential work of anti-capitalist struggle in the here and now. To this end, it argues for imminent utopias to be enacted through a revolutionary praxis of prefiguration, embracing the uncertainty of the current historical moment, as an opportunity to actively forge post-capitalist relations that prioritizes economies of care, eco-social balance and collective flourishing.