The rest of this book is devoted to the project of minimizing the risks, perhaps the very presence, of the metaphor of object while trying to preserve most of its advantages. The task is admittedly ambitious and far from easy. To succeed, we will have to suspend disbelief and remain patient when we slip and falter, trying to bootstrap ourselves from our present discourse into the new one, yet to be invented.

Clearly, we are not going to be the first to undertake the task of disobjectification. The necessary initial step, then, is to survey the history of earlier attempts and try to understand the reasons for their insufficiency. The subsequent move will be to identify those developments that seem to have taken us “almost there” and can thus become a basis for our own trials. Finally, a specific proposal for a disobjectified discourse on thinking will be made. All along, we will need to keep in mind that our present task is not one of establishing empirical facts about thinking but rather of finding useful ways of talking about the phenomenon.

Monological and dialogical discourses on thinking

The numerous historical attempts to overcome the pitfalls of objectification took different forms, depending on whether they were undertaken as a part of monological or dialogical research. Let me elaborate.