ABSTRACT
Dialogism uses talk-in-interaction as a model and metaphor for human communication and cognition, but dialogical analysis can be applied to written texts, Internet-and-computer-mediated communication, the use of artifacts, and so forth. A dialogistic theory of meaning is naturally opposed to ideas of literal meaning and subjective solipsistic meaning; it builds on ideas of intersubjectivity, the social origin of minds and meanings, and the dialogical constitution of sense, which are ideas in the spirit of L. Wittgenstein, L. S. Vygotsky, and M. M. Bakhtin. Understandings must be accomplished by human actors whose minds are embedded within worlds of socioculturally appropriated knowledge and who operate in interactions with others and with situational conditions in their actual sense making. Ragnar Rommetveit's work is a struggle for meaning, and for explaining what meaning is, in a dialogical world. Scientific theorizing about the world is partly characterized by contradictions and complementarity.
