Wittgenstein and 'Dialogue'

Wittgenstein's work is especially relevant for understanding ‘hard’ kinds of dialogue: intercultural, interfaith and religious-secular dialogue, i.e. dialogues between individuals or groups with different overall perspectives on reality as a whole, and orientations in life. Wittgenstein emphasized the fact that different world-pictures – and hence, we can extrapolate, different religions and cultures – are often characterized by different depth-grammars. But he also affirmed important ‘connecting links’ between these: in his later work he repeatedly writes that a persistent grammatical investigation reveals that the roots of most language games are not in intellectual reasoning but in instinctive reactions. While these are not necessarily 'good', they comprise 'non-intellectual grounds' that enable - especially if dialogue partners persist in joint, cross-worldpicture grammatical investigation for some time - significant degree of interfaith and intercultural (literal) communication.