Supporting the development of wisdom: The dialogical perspective

Abstract

The article presents internal dialogical activity as one of the possible ways of developing wisdom, understood here primarily in terms of dialectical thinking. The author explains the relationships between internal dialogical activity and dialectical thinking and describes the cognitive processes that accompany inner dialogs, related to imaginative thinking, attention management, metacognition, and the use of conceptual knowledge with ambiguous contents. The active involvement of these processes seems indispensable for achieving dialectic effects through dialogical activity, including the acceptance of contradictions and the integration of different viewpoints. The final part of the article discusses practical methods of supporting wisdom based on three manifestations of inner dialogical activity: identity dialogs, temporal dialogs, and dialogs simulating social interactions.