Inquiry as internal dialog

Conversation is a matter of swapping texts. Dialogue includes as well the practice of providing contexts for each other’s texts. Dialog as inquiry aims at a common text suitable for the common experiential context, which is the system in which it lives.

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.

— Wittgenstein (1969, #105)

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