The dialogical mind: Common sense and ethics Ivana Marková

Abstract

Book after book, Ivana Markova´has pursued a rigorous exploration of the dialogical nature of human experience and society, from Paradigms, though and language (1982), where she showed the social nature of language, to the well-known Dialogicality and social representations (2003) exploring the dialogical nature of social representations, and with it, the deep articulation of inner and outer dialogues in society, and finally in her remarkable The Dialogical mind: Common sense and ethics (Markova´, 2016) where the enquiry is pushed both to the very foundation of dialogical thinking and to their empirical and practical implications in common sense and everyday life. The thread linking these three books is, according to the author, ''a continuous struggle to understand the interdependence between Self and Others in thought, language in their historical and cultural perspective'' (Markova´, 2016, p. x). In parallel to this theoretical route, Markova´here draws on her recent work on trust (Markova´& Gillespie, 2008, 2011) and her reflection on post-totalitarian societies (among others Markova, 2004; Markova´& Plichtova´, 2007). ''Dialogical'' is here understood in a strong sense: ''the dialogical perspective presented in this book presupposes that the nature of the Self-Other interdependence is ethical and that ethics is embedded in common sense thinking and socially shared knowledge'' (Markova´, 2016, p. 4). This ethical presupposition is also the core message of the book, and it is progressively and systematically demonstrated. In order to do so, Markova´proceeds in two main movements. The first is critical and deconstructive. Entitled '''superior' and 'inferior' modes of thinking and knowing,'' the first section of the book traces back the historical division between rational and irrational thought, or logos and mythos. It then progressively establishes, through a careful reading of the work of Giambattisto Vico, the possibility of a dialogical form of knowledge, or common sense, beyond these divisions. The second movement is a systematic theoretical construction. Under the title ''Dialogicality as epistemology of daily life and of professional practices,'' the second section proposes a series of theoretical, ethical and epistemological axioms, on the basis of which theory is developed, concepts deduced, and implication for methodology and practice examined. This construction is anchored, on the one side, in Markova´'s deep and careful analysis of philosophies of intersubjectivity and dialogue, and on the other, in a wide variety of empirical examples. In the next sections, I retrace these two movements, before highlighting some of the books' contributions to cultural psychology and the social sciences. From higher/inferior to common sense as cultural mode of knowing Markova´starts by reminding us how the division between ''logos'' and ''mythos'' is taken-for-granted since the Antiquity, and that our history of knowledge has almost systematically preferred the first one, living with the illusion that science and po...