Managing Dialogue in Terms of Belief and Acceptance

We often consider dialogue an interaction between two
individuals or groups with different opinions about something.
In simple terms, the two parties in constructive
dialogue engage in conversation so as to become more
transparent to each other, and, through that very process,
to themselves. If the difference of opinion is not resolved,
or is not put aside as irrelevant, it can often be reduced to
a set of statements that express a contradiction. After
some time, it becomes obvious that one party holds that P
while the other holds that ~P. From this simple observation,
it follows that the usual attempt to establish harmony
between the different parties in dialogue by insisting that
each should include the other"s point of view is unsatisfactory.
The problem is that enlarging one"s horizon to
include the other"s point of view very often results in an
inconsistent set of beliefs, namely a set that includes both
P and ~P. In any discussion on dialogue, therefore, it is
crucial to be clear about the nature of contradictions in
one"s set of beliefs and to have some strategy about how
to handle inconsistency. In this paper, I will proceed in two
steps. In the first, I will indicate how some attempts at
trying to manage contradictions in terms of ontology
remain unsatisfactory. In the second step, I will introduce
and evaluate another way in terms of belief and acceptance.