Dear Nick, It's late, 1:00 a.m. I found our conversation very stimulating. Thank you. I want to start to write down my thoughts before they've disappeared in the rabbit hole of time. Dialectic is a fundamental characteristic of our thinking, because that thinking arises from dialogue, from conversation, from the natural, unavoidable exchange and conflict of ideas of individuals speaking to each other. "Conversation stoppers" to which I believe you referred, I interpret as unilateral assertions outside the frame of the dialogue which have the perhaps only transient effect of stopping the exchange of ideas. The meaning of words arises from dialogue. Words have no existence and no meaning apart from the conversations that create them. (I apologize to the compilers of dictionaries, but theirs is ultimately a fools errand.) Scholastics - as in the Middle Ages - depend on "schools" as echo chambers, where "thinkers" converse only with each other, and create the contrived artificial meanings of words which they consider the springs of wisdom, but which loose their meanings as soon as they are no longer reechoed. Good night EJM