In recent decades, important advances have been made in understanding how discursive symmetry can be achieved in whole-class dialogue. However, very little is known about how this dialogue may progress in the sense of critically linking ideas in coherent lines of collective inquiry. This article investigates this issue by analyzing 4 consecutive sessions of a science class with children ages 8 to 10 and identifies a social mechanism that can explain the emergence of progressiveness in collective inquiry. The identified mechanism consists of a series of iterations of the sequence (Direction) → Inference ↔ Observation ↔ Consensus → Fixation. This sequence enables the transition from local to collective agency and meaning. Direction creates a gap in a semantic structure, leading to the local formation of an inference. This inference then escalates through observation and consensus before finally being fixed through the creation of an artifact that reifies it as a collective meaning. Based on this collective meaning, a new direction leads to a new local inference, and the cycle begins again.

近几十年来，在理解如何在全班对话中实现话语对称性方面取得了重要进展。但是，从在集体探究的连贯路线中批判性地联系思想的意义上，这种对话如何发展尚不清楚。本文通过分析8至10岁儿童的科学课的连续4堂课来研究此问题，并确定一种可以解释集体探究性进步出现的社会机制。所识别的机制由序列（方向）→推理↔观察↔共识→固定的一系列迭代组成。此顺序使从本地代理到集体代理和意义的过渡成为可能。方向在语义结构中造成缺口，导致推理的局部形成。然后，这种推断会通过观察和共识逐步升级，最后通过创建工件来将其统一为统一含义的方法得以修复。基于这种集体含义，新的方向导致了新的局部推断，并且循环再次开始。