Analysing Intellectual Development on a Non-essentialist Basis: A Theoretical-Methodological Framework

Dialogism focuses solely on demonstrating the indispensability of knowledge transmissions from non-European civilizations to Europe in the making of modern science, but it does not engage in any analysis of the phenomenon of intellectual development itself. In order to transcend dialogism, a specially designed theoretical-methodological framework for analysing intellectual development is developed. This framework draws upon theories, concepts, and insights from a variety of disciplines including historical sociology, philosophy of science, physics, evolutionary theory, organizational sociology, institutionalist economics, and so on, which, together with our own views, are synthesized into a particular approach, comprising of a number of variables. In the literature, some of these variables are regarded, by both Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric scholars alike, as necessarily essentialist. This is a huge misunderstanding, which is one major cause of dialogism’s limitations as a perspective.