Real Conversation - A Sketch

Here are some atheoretical observations on what I think of as 'real conversations'. These types of conversations can arise in many contexts - between friends, in seminars, in administrative meetings, in contract negotiations, in laboratories and in therapy sessions.

They are conversations in which we feel something has happened, progress has been made, a perspective has been achieved; in which honest interaction has been seriously attempted ...

Here are some things I think are characteristic of such conversations:

(I will refer to the participants using the first person plural 'we').

1. We value exploration over demonstration and discovery over narrative.
• All demonstrations, all narratives, are treated as hypothetical: 'Our statements, interpreted this way, seem to lead us here?'
• Ultimately, our explorations and discoveries will be about the nature of what can be made intelligible within the conversation
2. In particular, 'Rules of intelligibility' are mutually explored, and not dictated. We do not tell each other 'how to talk'. This exploratory process cannot be curtailed by any appeal to externalities (e.g.'metaphysical fundamentals').
• This is a complex and kaleidoscopic issue, full of self-reference. At bottom, our sense of whether the 'rules' are being complied with will be kinaesthetic - it will be the same sense as our sense of whether we can talk at all, of whether we are going 'mad' ... 
• Some 'facts' (e.g. about the world, or about what we had said in the course of the conversation) are actually kinds of rules about how we are expected to talk.
3. The boundaries of the conversation are explored within the conversation.
4. There are no tacit assumptions that cannot be explicitly addressed when the occasion arises.
• What we do by engaging in the conversation must be congruent with the explicit content of what we say. Any sense of incongruence here can be explored explicitly within the conversation.
5. Uncomfortable silences are taken as seriously as incontrovertible arguments. We know that hearing a convincing argument for a conclusion that we cannot accept is a creative moment
6. We treat each other as honest and competent interlocutors. We do not accuse each other of bad faith.
• Each of us, however, must take responsibility for the amount of effort we are prepared to put into making sense of each other. If we exit the conversation, we obviously leave behind any forum within which we might 'explain' our exit. This has ethical consequences which must be appreciated by all participants, to a minimal extent.

I'll come back to this periodically, and adjust it.

Wordlessness

We can only ask questions in a language we understand. We can, however, feel wordlessly miserable, confused, fearful, and incongruent.

And yet being able to speak is itself, viscerally and computationally, a knowing how. We are neither aware of any 'internal linguistic machinery' nor can the metaphor of internal machinery be unpacked without generating paradoxes that render the unpacking itself incoherent. We cannot give a demonstrably intelligible account of why our accounts are, in general, intelligible ...

But our attempts to speak are not vain. If they were, we could not intelligibly say so ('Our attempts to give an account are vain' is an account ...)

And so we experiment and discover. We cannot map the whole landscape, but our feelings of incongruence guide us to those areas that it would be most productive to explore. We find new ways to use our words, and, where necessary, we find new words.

This is science, as well as therapy.