The process, particularly employed in Plato’s dialogues, of discovering first principles, or underlying realities, through digging out, possibly through Socratic questioning of another, what is presupposed by our common sense beliefs about, and experience of, the world. The Socratic, or negative, dialectic would be one practiced in the early dialogues where the demolition of wrong opinions is all that is desired; the Platonic dialectic proper would aim at also unearthing supersensory realities (Platonic universals). The Hegelian dialectic is a process through which mind (or reason) moves through history, acting and reacting, toward some final resolution; the Marxist dialectic sees this historical process as fundamentally economic, and material, in character.