On the possibility of conversation between distinct discourses

• Robert Jenson

Do I then say that “E=mc²” and “The Son proceeds from the Father” work just the same way? I do not think I do. But I do say that insofar as either “E=mc²” or “The Son proceeds from the Father” is true, insofar as either has any purchase on something other than itself, they depend for this purchase on their situation in one total human cognitive discourse, which has no clear internal epistemological boundaries. To put it from the side that will make the point most offensively plain: if science does not belong to the same discourse as does theology, then science is a play of fictions.

I do say that no subregion of human discourse can be a normative paradigm of any other, not because they are so discrete but because their mutual boundaries are so blessedly ill-defined.

from Essays in the Theology of Culture (Eerdmans, 1995), 223-224.

• Stephen Mulhall (drawing on Rush Rhees)

the image of a conversation suggests an account of any given mode of human discourse in terms of its own dialogical unity — with the multiple bearings of each branch of that discourse on other branches giving substance to the thought that each individual branch gets a purchase on reality by showing how the purchase it offers hangs together with (that is, is fruitfully intelligible to, and can itself render fruitfully intelligible) the purchase offered by other branches. And the same kind of account can then be given of the relations between these modes of discourse: their various ways of interlocking with one another substantiate the claims of each to register some aspect of the reality of things.

from The Conversation of Humanity (Univ VA Pr., 2007), 38.