How to Use dialectic in a Sentence

dialectic

noun
  • The students would soon be caught up in the thrust and parry of dialectic.
    New York Times, 22 Sep. 2021
  • The first test of this new dialectic wasn’t long in coming.
    Andrew Browne, WSJ, 5 Dec. 2017
  • How strange to see this very dialectic embraced by the far right.
    Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, 19 Sep. 2017
  • This contrast, or dialectic, is the focus of one section of the show.
    Benjamin Lima, Dallas News, 29 Apr. 2020
  • Yet in our own country, and our own time, that simple dialectic doesn’t sound so far off.
    Michael Phillips, chicagotribune.com, 21 June 2018
  • And now, with Lemonade as the thesis and 4:44 the antithesis, the Hegelian hip-hop dialectic is complete.
    Dan Deluca, Philly.com, 18 June 2018
  • But the two artists’ relationships to the good girl-bad girl dialectic are not so different.
    Diane Pecknold, Fortune, 13 Sep. 2017
  • The policing took place through Greenberg’s insistence on his own eye as the only arbiter of the dialectic.
    Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 5 Apr. 2021
  • And in a way, the entire dialectic unfairly reduces the tournament, their teams and both men.
    Brian Straus, SI.com, 30 June 2018
  • The screenplay explores—or in any case devotes some talk to—the dialectic of altruism and selfishness.
    Joe Morgenstern, WSJ, 8 Apr. 2021
  • This was always the dialectic of boxing—even the most ardent racists were trying, in their way, to deal with the fact that, under the fair-fight Queensberry Rules, a Black man could beat the living hell out of a white man.
    Jay Caspian Kang, The New York Review of Books, 27 Aug. 2020
  • The con man's Ron job provokes a final attorney dialectic.
    Darren Franich, EW.com, 10 Nov. 2022
  • The two scores that Lewis presented at the Armory embodied a dialectic of complexity and play.
    Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 8 Jan. 2024
  • Theirs is a dazzling dialectic — a sort of Talmudic argument as snarled by junkyard dogs.
    F. Kathleen Foley, latimes.com, 2 May 2018
  • Schools exist to stifle freedom, and also to inculcate it, a dialectic that is the essence of true education.
    A.o. Scott, New York Times, 21 June 2023
  • Elements of the culture drove him toward those actions, yet as is always the case in the dialectic of character and circumstance, Lincoln transformed the times.
    Washington Post, 13 Nov. 2020
  • Messing with that dialectic is the peak of technological hubris.
    Jason Linkins, The New Republic, 7 Aug. 2021
  • Some UX proponents have realized this trap and reframed their design practice as a dialectic between the gifted and the rabble.
    Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, 20 July 2017
  • Women Talking is set up to be a debate rather than a dialectic: no one among the assembled is saying these assaults didn’t happen, just arguing over what the response should be.
    David Fear, Rolling Stone, 23 Dec. 2022
  • The dialectic has failed to produce a reliable consensus.
    Time, 29 Oct. 2022
  • This Founding dialectic between the popular children of light and the elite children of darkness was built into the rhetoric of Jeffersonian democracy from the start.
    Cameron Hilditch, National Review, 18 Dec. 2020
  • This leads to a rural dialectic, where rural professionals hold the seemingly opposing views that rural work is, and is not, of high quality.
    Timothy Baker, Quartz at Work, 27 Nov. 2019
  • Irrelevant, predictable, just a footnote to the dialectic.
    Ross Douthat, National Review, 31 Mar. 2022
  • The dialectic of regret is key to Grade’s creative brilliance as well as his appeal to Orthodox readers, unusual for a secular writer.
    Elliot Kaufman, WSJ, 25 Nov. 2022
  • Godwin also discussed Hegel’s dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, with which a case can be made that the United States is currently grappling.
    Michelle L. Quinn, chicagotribune.com, 21 Feb. 2022
  • In our deeply bifurcated world, Forché’s best writing engages in a kind of dialectic, one in which the truth of experience burns as brightly as the author’s intuition and imagination.
    Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 30 Mar. 2020
  • The Woody Allen figure in a Woody Allen movie is almost always in transit from one woman to another, impelled by a dialectic of enchantment, disappointment and reawakened desire.
    A. O. Scott, New York Times, 31 Jan. 2018
  • And in this drama of opposing forces, through this brutal dialectic, aspects of each woman’s anatomy are grotesquely eroticized by her adversary: buttocks for the black woman, breasts for her white counterpart.
    Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books, 27 Feb. 2020
  • Either way, there’s some intellectual common ground, both in facts and methodologies, that leads to the hypothesis-thesis-synthesis dialectic of Socrates or Hegel.
    Antonio García Martínez, WIRED, 28 May 2018
  • As Frias continues to parallelize his narrative between America and Mexico, the two strands begin to feel less like jumps in time than a dialectic about alienation and connection, color and darkness.
    Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times, 26 Feb. 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'dialectic.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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