1) Human thought is inherently dialogic.

What does that mean? Well, “dialogic” refers to the use of conversation to explore meaning. We can’t make sense of the world entirely by ourselves. When we listen, we hear new ideas that challenge our beliefs. Debating with others causes us to become more self-conscious and allows us to understand our own thinking more clearly. That’s why so many ancient philosophers wrote in the form of dialogues (think of Plato’s Republic, among others). 

2) Conversation is an ancient technology.

According to Dr. Thalia Wheatley, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College, “Conversation is this ancient technology for aligning our brains so that we can be on the same page.” In fact, when French Jesuits landed in North American and encountered Indigenous peoples (specifically the speakers of the Iroquoian languages), they discovered they were already having the kind of reasoned, rational, skeptical, empirical, conversational debates about communal affairs and individual freedoms that eventually became identified with the European Enlightenment and debates about ‘equality’ (The Dawn of Everything, p. 38-48). 

3) Hegel’s dialectic proves we need disagreement.

What is Hegel’s dialectic? There are three parts: the thesis, antithesis, and the synthesis. The thesis is the idea itself. The antithesis is the moment of dialogue, when the idea is confronted with other ideas. Finally, the synthesis is when the idea returns “home”, newly developed and empowered by what it learned from the antithesis. Then, the cycle repeats. Hegel’s dialectic shows that opposition to our ideas actually helps us grow and develop.

4) Conversation improves the quality of our relationships.

And not just conversation about the weather! Going deeper in conversation – not just staying on common ground – creates more meaningful connections. When Dr. Diana Tamir and her colleagues at Princeton university used neuroimaging data linking brain activity to the various mental states that occur during conversation, they found that friends “ spend the conversation diverging, spending more and more time exploring new and different states. That pattern leads to better conversations, including when strangers have conversations where they diverge and their neural patterns look more like friends’ patterns.”

5) Dialogue reminds us that we are not alone.

Modern technology can make us feel isolated. We are surrounded by efforts to quantify the human experience using numbers and charts. Bureaucracy and the modern media make it easy to forget the uniqueness and wholeness of each human being. When we interact with others and hear their perspectives, we remember that each person alive in the world has their own inner universe. We remember how much there is to learn from ordinary life.