Towards a Theory of the Imaginative Dialogue: Four Dialogical Principles

This paper seeks to initiate a theory of “imaginative dialogues” by articulating four dialogical principles that enable such a dialogue to occur. It is part of a larger project that takes the Socratic dialogue, a widely utilized conversation technique in philosophy education, as a starting point and aims to reinterpret it by shifting emphasis to the pre-reflective, pre-linguistic, and multimodal aspects of dialogues, involving both their verbal and embodied dimensions. To integrate the verbal dimensions of a dialogue with its more elusive embodied dimensions, the paper will examine the notion ‘dialogue’ from the perspective of two different strategies. The first strategy chiefly focuses on the dialogic encounter. The ‘in-between’ of this dialogic encounter enables something to emerge that transcends the individual perspective of the speakers involved. The second strategy is primarily concerned with internal differentiation. The minor differences that constitute this internal differentiation, differentiate a dialogue from within. These strategies are not mutually exclusive but indicate a variation in starting point and orientation. This paper proposes to combine these two strategies by linking accounts of the productive moments in verbal dialogues to an account of the imaginative potential of embodied dialogues. This will enable the articulation of four dialogical principles (derived from Lev Yakubinsky, Oswald Ducrot, Martin Buber, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz) through which an imaginative dialogue can proceed.