In the book and consulting project sketched in this blog, Otto Laske shows how to facilitate societal transformations by elaborating Margaret Archer’s work on “Structure, Agency, and Internal Conversations” (2003). He thereby extends both Bhaskar’s “The Possibility of Naturalism” (1979) and Archer’s work into dialectical practice. To deepen Archer’s logical approach, Laske introduces adult-developmental and cognitive-developmental foundations of the “internal conversations” that, in Archer’s view, mediate Bhaskar’s structure/agency dialectic, introducing three interrelated dialectics:
- The ontological dialectic of Moments of the real (being) issuing in generative mechanisms as distinct from actualities and experiences (Bhaskar 1979).
- The epistemic dialectic of human thought forms (TFs) operating within individuals’ internal workplace (in contrast to their external workplace), — the mental space in which ‘work’ is done and ‘agency’ is launched (Laske 2008).
- The dialectic of generative mechanisms by which human thought forms (TFs) assume and exert causal power as determinants of needs and reasons based on which agents are in unceasing interaction with each other and thus the real world, natural and social (Laske 2021).
