ABSTRACT
This chapter discuses four features of conversations. First, conversations take place between people; they are not events we can understand simply by probing inside any one person. Second, conversations are public rather than personal and private. Third, conversations involve addressivity. Finally, conversations encompass verbal, nonverbal, symbolic and written material. These four features link person and other in such an intimate way that disentangling the bonds that join them becomes an exercise in futility. The dialogic turn transforms the dominant project of the Western world, its self-celebratory, other-suppressing stance, into a necessary celebration of the other. The key to the feminist view of the dialogic basis of mind is to be found in the critique of the dominant epistemological position in which good knowledge is equated with objective knowledge, which is said to be abstract and removed from any concrete particularities.
