Michael Oakeshott writes:
It may be supposed that the diverse idioms of utterance which make up current human intercourse have some meeting-place and compose a manifold of some sort. And, as I understand it, the image of this meeting-place is not an inquiry or an argument, but a conversation.
In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no 'truth' to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing. Of course, a conversation may have passages of argument and a speaker is not forbidden to be demonstrative; but reasoning is neither sovereign nor alone, and the conversation itself does not compose an argument. . . . In conversation, 'facts' appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; 'certainties' are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other 'certainties' or with doubts, but by being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally remote from one another. Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other's movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions. Nobody asks where they have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares what will become of them when they have played their part. There is no symposiarch or arbiter, not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials. Every entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get itself accepted into the flow of speculation. And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.
This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse, appropriate
because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships
of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors,
neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating
body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests
and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is
a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.
Of course there is argument and inquiry and information, but wherever these
are profitable they are to be recognized as passages in this conversation,
and perhaps they are not the most captivating of the passages. It is the
ability to participate in this conversation, and not the ability to reason
cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better
world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized
man from the barbarian. Indeed, it seems not improbable that it was the
engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that
gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes
who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails. Education,
properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this
conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish
the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual
and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation
whidh, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and
utterance.
("The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation
of Mankind," 196-98)