for discussion/debate? Unfortunately the word has largely Hegelian and/or Marxist connotations nowadays doesn't it? Anyway, with (Plato's) Socrates, dialectic

for discussion/debate? Unfortunately the word has largely Hegelian and/or Marxist connotations nowadays doesn't it? Anyway, with (Plato's) Socrates, dialectic doesn't seem to have been two people candidly searching for the truth either - usually it was Socrates expertly pretending to do that, while actually showing some expert just how much he didn't know about his chosen subject. For me, dialectic and derived words mean Hegelian dialectic. That's 99.99% where I've heard the words used.