HOW DOES AUTODIALOGUE WORK - MIRACLES OF MEANING MAINTENANCE AND CIRCUMVENTION STRATEGIES

In contemporary sociocultural studies, the human mind is often claimed to be dialogic. Precise elaborations of models of dialogicality are r are, however. We present a process model of dialogicality that occurs within a person's self-system (autodialogue) in the context of two kin ds Of tasks: making sense of ordinary happenings and understanding rel igious miracles. We start from the assumption that the person is invol ved in an ongoing self- and world-reflecting meaning-making in which t he semiotically mediated reflections on the world and on one's own sel f are constantly created, negotiated and transformed Once a meaning em erges in an ambiguous action setting, it is instantly worked on throug h a process entailing circumvention strategies, which allow the person to rigidify or qualify it. The work of these strategies is elaborated theoretically with the help of a hypothetical example of reasoning fr om everyday life, and is demonstrated empirically by evidence from adu lts' reasoning about biblical miracles. Autodialogue is shown to work through the flexible construction of circumvention strategies in any h ere-and-now setting.