dialectic

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The art or practice of arriving at the truth by the exchange of logical arguments.
2. n. The process especially associated with Hegel of arriving at the truth by stating a thesis, developing a contradictory antithesis, and combining and resolving them into a coherent synthesis.
3. n. Hegel's critical method for the investigation of this process.
4. n. The Marxian process of change through the conflict of opposing forces, whereby a given contradiction is characterized by a primary and a secondary aspect, the secondary succumbing to the primary, which is then transformed into an aspect of a new contradiction. Often used in the plural with a singular or plural verb.
5. n. The Marxian critique of this process.
6. n. A method of argument or exposition that systematically weighs contradictory facts or ideas with a view to the resolution of their real or apparent contradictions.
7. n. The contradiction between two conflicting forces viewed as the determining factor in their continuing interaction.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. Relating to the art of reasoning about probabilities; pertaining to scholastic disputation. Kantians sometimes use the word in the sense of pertaining to false argumentation.
2. Of or pertaining to a dialect or dialects; dialectal.
3. Also dialectical.
4. n. [= French dialectique = Sp. dialéctica = Pg. dialectica = It. dialettica = G. Dan. Sw. dialektik, ⟨ L. dialectica, ⟨ Gr. διαλεκτική (sc. τέχνη), the dialectic art, the art of discussion, logical debate, also the logic of probabilities, fem. of διαλεκτικός, belonging to disputation: see I.]
5. n. Logic, or a branch of logic; specifically, the art of critical examination into the truth of an opinion; inductive logic applied to philosophy; the logic of probable reasoning; the art of discussion and of disputation; logic applied to rhetoric and refutation. The invention of the art of dialectic is attributed to Zeno the Eleatic, whose arguments against motion are examples of the original meaning of the Greek word. The famous dialectic of Socrates and Plato, their chief instrument of philosophical inquiry, was a conversational discussion with inductive appeals to special instances. Dialectic was limited by Aristotle to logic accommodated to the uses of the rhetorician, appealing only to general belief, but not to first principles. The Stoics, who probably introduced the term logic, divided that art into rhetoric and dialectic, the former being the art of continuous discourse, the latter that of discussion with an interlocutor. Cicero and other Latin writers, influenced by Stoic doctrine, understand by dialectic “the art of discussing well” (ars bene disserendi). It thus became the name of that branch of the trivium of the Roman schools which we call logic, and retained that meaning throughout the middle ages. Hence, in all the earlier English literature, it is the synonym of logic, differing from that word only by a more distinct suggestion of the idea of disputation. Modern logicians have frequently restricted it to the doctrines of the Topics and Sophistical Elenchi, or to the former alone. It has also been used as a synonym of syllogistic. Kant named the constructive part of his Transcendental Logic transcendental analytic, and the destructive part transcendental dialectic. For the sake of this phrase, he makes dialectic, in general, the theory of fallacies. According to Hegel, each concept in the development of thought by a primitive necessity develops its own diametrical opposite, and to this reaction of thought against itself, regarded not as final, but as subject to a subsequent reconcilement in a higher order of thought, he gave the name of dialectic.
6. n. Skill in disputation. Also dialectics.

Wiktionary

1. n. Any formal system of reasoning that arrives at a truth by the exchange of logical arguments.
2. n. A contradiction of ideas that serves as the determining factor in their interaction.
3. adj. dialectical

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. Same as dialectics.
2. adj. Pertaining to dialectics; logical; argumental.
3. adj. Pertaining to a dialect or to dialects.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. any formal system of reasoning that arrives at the truth by the exchange of logical arguments
2. adj. of or relating to or employing dialectic
3. n. a contradiction of ideas that serves as the determining factor in their interaction