From FOI Professor Andrew Mamo:

Hiro is pointing us toward a broader set of conversations that directly implicate our field, including but not limited to Gadamer-Habermas, and I agree that these debates should be far better known within the dispute resolution field.

The distinction between strategic and communicative action, for example, poses hard questions for some of our field’s canonical texts. How should we understand accounts of empathy and listening that present them *both* as preconditions of mutual understanding *and* as techniques for efficiently satisfying interests? How should we understand apology, recognition, or self-determination in those terms? These are not merely academic questions; they bear on the coherence of some of our central ideas.

They also matter for the main theme of this blog as of late: AI and dispute resolution. If our field’s aspirations extend at all toward situated understanding and mutual encounter, what becomes of those encounters as they are reconfigured by statistical models that are folded into the structure of lived experience?

This question matters profoundly unless we are prepared to understand our field primarily as a domain of strategic action. But that requires returning to foundational questions about *what dispute resolution is.* It is a conversation worth having more explicitly.