Dialogue as the interplay of otherness and shared humanity.

Abstract

paraphrase a point made by Gadamer (1982), in order to understand a speaker, we have to understand what it would be like to be that speaker.Tolerance of others may be an aid to initiating civil conversation, but the virtue of dialogue is in its transformative potential, which prima facie seems the opposite of tolerance. As any academic knows, a good dialogue is a fight to the death.Finally, while the idea of "openness to the other" sounds very positive, I wonder whether the harm done by defining our fellow humans as "others" outdoes the subsequent call for "openness" toward them. Might cultural dialogue not be better served if we considered all humans as part of a single speech community, with various dialects of the same language, whose speakers can thereby exert meaningful influence upon one another?In sum, the virtue model of ethics is relevant to our cultural concerns as psychologists but certainly does not resolve them. Instead, because it is soundly based in the idea of personal character, its value lies in bringing to light the very dilemmas involving human similarity and difference that have troubled psychologists since the inception of the field. I do not believe that these dilemmas are going anywhere soon. REFERENCES

Beyond an abstract and technical conception of psychotherapy: The indispensable role of practical wisdom

“… 4. In our view, the best way to guard against value imposition is to recognize one’s value commitments and to leave them open to questioning, but the topic of a dialogic approach to values is beyond the scope of this article. See Fowers (2022), Fowers and Davidov (2007), and Richardson and Fowers (1998) for more on this topic. …”