attempt on the practical structure of dialectical/free thought
first:
You start with some assumption p. It’s not a consciously chosen thesis, it’s more a working hypothesis that pre-exists in you for whatever reasons. You go through life, acting and observing, under this assumption p.
secondly:
you reach a point where you have noticed so many contradictions to p that you start to assume/posit the negation: you consciously entertain the possibility that p was wrong, that non-p, and you start re-forming your behaviour and character to fit the practical consequences of non-p.
This is where critical thought and maybe deutero-re-learning starts.
thirdly:
Having then gone through life under the assumption non-p, and thus assuming those theses that arise/occur after a time of going through life under the base assumption non-p, you reach a point where you have noticed so many contradictions to those theses that this option doesn’t seem viable either.[!]
There are two options for your response to this:
Standard logic/reason dictates that if non-p is false, then p must in fact be true – that you’ve missed something or must simply return back to the original p.
Meanwhile, dialectical logic opens the possibility that {p, non-p} is an imcomplete set of options due to the possibility that p and non-p are in fact at the same end of an under-lying concept, causing the hypotheses of both p and non-p to exclude certain possibilities.
So: you take a step back and re-examined the concepts/terms that p consists of or pre-supposes.
This is where free thought starts – at the point where you realise that the ideas/concepts behind p simply aren’t adequate, so that it stops being a matter of correct judgement and becomes a matter of re-conceptualization.
and a simplified, generalised example:
Looking at some aspect of the world, you see the options in this aspect are A and B.
You learn that option A doesn’t work.
You deduce that option B must/should work.
You miss the possibility that both A and B are products of a contingent property of the world, a property whose
change would produce option C.
This possibility implies that B might not
be significantly better than A – and this despite A being discarded and A and B seeming to be the complete available options.