Let's start with a game
Share your keyboard with two friends. Work together to move your little dialogic explorers and try to read the quote hidden in the dark using their subjectively tinted headlamps.

You may have noticed that you could only see your figure in someone else's headlamp. Bakhtin also related this dialogic notion of truth to truths about ourselves:

"In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding - in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space and because they are others" (Bakhtin, 1976/1986)*.

*Bakhtin died in 1975, and much of his most important writing was done in the first half of the century. Due to the internal political situations within Russia, and the political situation that existed between Russia and the West, much of his work was not published in Russia until decades after it was written, and wasn't translated into English until decades after that.

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of dostoevsky's poetics. (C. Emerson, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published in 1963).

Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays.. C. Emerson & M. Holquist, (Eds.). (V. W. McGee, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. (Original work published in 1976).