ABSTRACT
A difficulty that stands in the way of global conversation, even today, is the sheer diversity of experience as human beings. So far, then, the suggestion is that conversation between human beings is possible, in principle, and hence that the notion of ‘global conversation’ is, in principle, coherent, because the idea of radically incommensurable conceptual frameworks being inhabited by those who recognized each other to be human beings simply does not make sense. Speech that has forgotten that the fundamental form of speech is conversation; forgotten that to be able to converse with others is to have been schooled in a culture of relationships; forgotten that all conversation and all culture are, ultimately, answerable not only to each other but to God – such speech would, in the long run, cease to be speech at all and, with this cessation, its utterers would be less than human.
